griddle drippings, first(ish) draft

Cheap Giggle of the Plastic Shuttle

We Google the names of the astronauts,
knees up on your kitchen table.

O God, these yellow cars and undulations
in apartments facing Safeway.
You in your research of Irish wars.
Me and my radical collared gunk.

Someone is clanking a fingernail
on a candy dish of snookered tongues.

Let my glowsticks work on Sunday morning,
in the throes of slanted heads and wet stairs.
Tonight, a dude to whom I've never
lent a pocketknife or my faintest glint

will make a joke about the government,
hog the keyboard, snuff away unpocketed.

This is between our stingy compassion
and a universe of dead ants. It's dire --
though the Challenger tugged the whiskers
from the owner of a local deli. And no,

no, we may never know that hounding,
like a flood victim, like a late knife.

But we need the fuck out of those names.
We've opened seven jillion frozen brands,
but we have not yet purchased any real
smudge, any trumped up foray into birth.