This combustible fetish for those

early-early Brueghels. That swell

5-pack of life-giving devices, 1 in each pocket.

 

Everyone is waiting, long dead or tapping

toe-sized feet, barf-muck

between the slips of their licit toes.

 

Hopefully you’re saving, after all,

the clashiest for last. With any luck

 

it’s molding

into complex techniques, minor jealousies

the color of tea and a global pop mainstream.

But who knows. It’s all so sad for us, etc.

 

***
Jeremy Schmidt lives in Los Angeles where he is completing a PhD in English while working in the UCLA Scholarship Resource Center. His writing has appeared in Boston Review, Lana Turner, Los Angeles Review of Books, Prelude, and elsewhere, and a handful of his poems were selected by John Ashbery for the 2014 “Discovery” Poetry Prize.