in the Year of Zoll

Sometimes I just can't believe that I live in the 21st century.
It's not that I can't wrap my head around scientific adavances
like robovacuums
and bacon flavored vodka,
it's more so the fact that that I can't even get comfortable
with writing out the numerals 2011
(as well as all the nostalgia clustered around that discomfort).
Every time I write it out complete
I don't see a number at all.
In point of fact, all I can see
(until I put other numbers around it)
is the word
Zoll.

Now this may be entirely due to poor penmanship on my part,
but I find I quite like living in the year of Zoll.
Indeed, I find I greatly prefer it
to living even in the notorious 21st century.
All necessary respects being given to the visions of Jules Verne,
the gadgets here buzz ostentatious,
too busily widening the having gaps.
Smartphones have become a nearly clear-cut socieo-economic identifier.
Incomes expend and the Apps pile up like magazines
on the cement in your uncle's garage.

Zoll is much miles less mundane.
In the year of Zoll
people began punctuating their buttonholes with pinwheels
and folding manifestos into fortune cookies.
Zoll opened with daisy-mouthed whimsy.
23 turtles sunbathing.
Hashbrowns that couldn't help but be slipped from your best friend's plate.

Zoll was the year that progress and gentrification finally saw through each other's skins,
began seeing other people,
only making contact prophylactically, and under the safety of goose-down covers.
Venn diagrams became very popular,
so much so that it seemed you could draw them about anything
and anything else.
Zoll became all about intersections and collisions.
Nobody scorned garish outbursts
or crying out while masturbating.
It was in the year of Zoll that they started cracking down on empty intercourse,
volunteers posted conversation prompts in elevators
and bathroom graffiti was encouraged
by mandating each stall have at least one wall lined blue like notebook paper.
Etiquette instructors secretly bit their nails, and became more obsolete.
On new years night the mountains called out cloudy-voiced to the Moon
and She broke open like a dusky pinata
showering our archived bones in foldable light and clockwork mnemonic devices.

Patience & Rhythmic Salt

I am waiting for the bricks to pull me in,
for the bass to ultimately shake the fantasies into action;
call forth an alternate universe:

An ocean of jitters
endlessly coming & going--
Making frothy footholds at the moon's expense.
Our minds have got jellyfish & driftwood for teeth;
Our poem coming up loose with mouthfuls of sand,
The thoughts crust over & dry out
like leftover starfish.

She drinks like a fish
who has a liver for every broken heartbeat.
Fish bones beguile the teeth
& finger the roof of your mouth like an insect

& I am waiting for the embrace of the jellyfish;
for the year of the sand-dollar
-a time when this series of crashes might buy you back.

I am waiting for the tide to wash up
empty of fish heads & needle bones,
Waiting for the salt to heal
for the jellyfish to untie their stings
(&move forward in the tempo of the lungs)

I am waiting for the moment I can reach up
and pry open tha short yawn of sunshine,
plant my hook in the yellow mouth of sky,
and drag her by the teeth into spring.