Human Mojo

By Nicholas Alti

People can eat some paint, chug small loads of detergent or toad venom. Can over plant tobacco

and put a match through an areola piercing. People can fake pleasure, nervously suckle strangers.

Can fill a bird cage with squid ink and camphor. Conjure carbon monoxide in a garage. Split

flesh, lapse. Take a shot at the king. Eyeball it. Beat the house, even odds. Guillotine spines.

I put it on the scale. Short a few grams; my friends rightly feel abandoned.

I adorn the saline shawl of hot ocean: unilaterally uninhabitable and ionized.

People can make mistakes and not change their ways. Lightning can’t strike a different place. Action happens in the refrain. It only sees if you look away. I’m 6,000 years old, trampled flat.

I dress for the job: become an orb of phosphorescent miasma and insert into orbit.

Can’t retain leakage with gauze. Stop ooze with adhesives. Come in, let’s fall out.

Let’s all turn the dial down to eleven. Right to deny you service. Withhold my graces. People can impress if you let them. When I removed my fingers, they left delicate impressions.