Like watching it try to rain on asphalt on a hundred and three degree day
my mouth starts flapping and you know to hear it talking before knowing
what to say (I hate to invoke its is-ness) as if the voice is a passing through
I mispronounce words I've never heard and I don't so much mind the consequences of talking to
myself but when my self starts talking to me–

Megan used to tell me
about the sound textiles make
like a puff when she steps
on a bubbled linoleum kitchen floor
or the pfft when she sits
on a vinyl school bus seat
I'd have liked to live in those moments of jubilant flatulence–expand it out
like the end of Zabriske Point
watch dead skin cells dance-flutter through light feel the suck of air rushing
taste chalk–doom

waiting for coffee to steep with a butter knife scrap brownie scabs off
ungreased pan pile then press into
rounded glass corner banking for later

like the workman walking under
a ladder leaned against the church

you can only think so long until the chatter comes forth

I clear my throat or almost a hitch a bubble this whole apparatus
the engine who said that

folks who shove folded cardboard under table legs don't often know
about the little threaded plastic feet–
screw up or down; so the pen won't roll off
and how would they unless shown
things have parts meant to work

like the passage the workman passes through what if he were to

follow a moose into the woods
it's hair? No fur tears off in ribbons
the way a trail of moss winds through
the forest opens into a meadow where everything
explodes into color

Now that Patrick S. Rogers operates a truck scale at a non-ferrous metal recycler in Portland Oregon, he feels imposter syndrome with his Poetry MFA in Creative Writing from Portland State, until a lit mag like Propeller Magazine or The Gravity of the Thing decides to accept one of his poems. His wife Wendy Bourgeois, also a poet, assures him his 2 Boston Terriers, Chico Party and Dot-Dot, as well as his cat, Kurt Russel don’t care about the truck scale or the MFA.