“Last Tuesday I Stuck My Finger Into the Socket of Nomenclature and Suddenly I Was Mr. Bean.” | Trinity V. Fritz Lawrence | Poetry

Last Tuesday I Stuck My Finger into the Socket of Nomenclature and Suddenly I Was Mr. Bean.

Trinity V. Fritz Lawrence

The man at the register stopped me and said, “Ghostwriters are on strike, you can’t write a check.”

Outside the saints come and go with waves of nausea and barbecue breeze.

The jazz of his cologne will never leave, and I strike out to be another fixture in the mess of rancid bodies.

I looked at the sky and saw that it was green. I looked in your eyes and saw what you were thinking.

You magnificent kumquat, you made me wish I could write love poems.

So I wrote one for you. The space between Sundays became the greatest

Zeitgeber since sundials, I went from shrink-wrapped Jesus bites to

licking bits of myself off the floor of your car and picking four-leaf clovers on our dates.

I would say I love you if I spoke Greek. I went back and stole the baked beans from

the man at the register. I went into a dream, and you played music while

I read the words of dead men, talking about some sort of salvation, I wasn’t