UnEmployed

Unemployed #14

I dreamed a tunnel formed

silent mouths in each

of our empty basements.

This is as much

hope as I can muster.

Three nights ago I conjured you

laughing in torn jeans

and my white dress shirt, favorite

stock footage from years ago, and yet

I couldn’t make you speak to me.

I am powerless over

my own subconscious.

Still, I thought your look

might have said, I am sorry

about all this, and wish

it were different, but it isn’t.

If I close my eyes, hold

my breath, I can lean

forward into the tunnel

that will always

never lead me to you.

Unemployed #2

I find an

odd solace

in the possibility

you too are

remembering

how difficult it

is to fold

a bed sheet

by yourself.

Unemployed #8

I hold the remote just

so, it feels like her wrist.

My loneliness splits

in two when

the hero’s fiancée is stolen

by his evil twin,

who dresses snappier than

the good, is somehow

more handsome.

My heroine

advances, as if underwater,

toward his crooked

smile, to kiss it—picture

a finger slid down my throat. I click

to another planet, to remind myself

I lack the strength of this

indestructible superhero on the cusp

of being killed by an alien virus,

and the tension rises, until it spills

over into a dish soap demonstration,

making hygiene so piercingly

symbolic, I realize I’ll never

enjoy steady health insurance,

never again feel clean.

Click back to these twins

I’ve become: now locked

in awkward combat. Each fist

strikes its own face, then a caught

blade wavers between their throats

and the music crescendos like an over-

flowing toilet bowl, sanitized blue,

smelling of synthetic fruit—cut back

to when the evil twin—sucked into

a fall we won’t see the end of—

screams up at us, and the black

swallows him like a lozenge.

Already I can feel my teeth

growing whiter as I lose myself

in the eyes of my new lover,

amazed at how faithfully

they hold my reflection,

even as she winces, my misguided

dagger inside her. She daubs

at my tears, at my mouth

as it waters for a late-night hamburger.

I keep clicking to find a simile

for my desire for a responsive sedan

to drive off a moonlit cliff,

into the applauding waves below.

Television is the oven

I stick my head into.

Unemployed #4

I am so lonely

please at least

be my enemy