"Nothing misleads people like the truth."

Self-Help by Michael Ryan

What kind of delusion are you under?

The life he hid just knocked you flat.

You see the lightning but not the thunder.

What God hath joined let no man put asunder.

Did God know you’d marry a rat?

What kind of delusion are you under?

His online persona simply stunned her

as it did you when you started to chat.

You see the lightning but not the thunder.

To the victors go the plunder:

you should crown them with a baseball bat.

What kind of delusion are you under?

The kind that causes blunder after blunder.

Is there any other kind than that?

You see the lightning but not the thunder,

and for one second the world’s a wonder.

Just keep it thrilling under your hat.

What kind of delusion are you under?

You see the lightning but not the thunder.

Stressed Out (but not today!)

Such as thou art, sometime I was.

Such as I am, such shalt thou be. 

To You Again by Mary Szybist

Again this morning my eyes woke up too close 

to your eyes,

their almost green orbs

too heavy-lidded to really look back.

To wake up next to you

is ordinary. I do not even need to look at you

to see you.

But I do look. So when you come to me

in your opulent sadness, I see 

you do not want me

to unbutton you

so I cannot do the one thing

I can do.

Now it is almost one a.m. I am still at my desk

and you are upstairs at your desk a staircase 

away from me. Already it is years

of you a staircase

away from me. To be near you

and not near you 

is ordinary.

You

are ordinary.

Still, how many afternoons have I spent 

peeling blue paint from

our porch steps, peering above 

hedgerows, the few parked cars for the first

glimpse of you. How many hours under 

the overgrown, pink Camillas, thinking

the color was wrong for you, thinking 

you'd appear

after my next 

blink.

Soon you'll come down the stairs 

to tell me something. And I'll say,

okay. Okay. I'll say it 

like that, say it just like

that, I'll go on being 

your never-enough.

It's not the best in you

I long for. It's when you're noteless,

numb at the ends of my fingers, all is 

all. I say it is. 

Her Politeness by Kay Ryan

It's her politeness
one loathes: how she
isn't insistent, how
she won't impose, how
nothing's so urgent
it won't wait. Like
a meek guest you tolerate
she goes her way- the muse
you'd have leap at your throat,
you'd spring to obey.

Your Other Heart by Natalie Shapero

Mossy and thumping, bare of logic, red:

             why do they say your other head

                          and not your other heart? 

The snack cakes of Smut Wonderland

turn Alice smaller than her dress. She stirs,

nude in the folds of so much baby blue. 

             To think, they called this lesser art.

I ate mostly orders then, and you—

you were thinking with your other heart. 

I took in a dog the way some might take in

             a dress (I had become just skin).

                          It coughed. I cried for it

to stop, I fed it meat, its malady

recurrent and untreatable. I had 

to give it up, like some bum body part 

             whose incidental benefit

the human form has out-evolved. Don’t start.

That dog: I called it Help, and I cried for it.