Portrait of the Artist as a Starfish in Coffee

What if the primary colors on your spectrum

were mud, muddled, and muddliest?

Benjamin Franklin invented the Internet

so that I could talk to folk but not face to face

and I know what purple-tailed hawk of thought

just perched on your extended wrist

but try to fit your average feet in my size 17s.

Fact: the average reader processes 300 wpm

and maybe they can read other people’s faces

like a vegan interrogating a list of ingredients

but what if every face was written in Braille

and you had only catcher’s mitts below your wrists,

or IKEA bookcases with reams of instructions

ciphered in tiny print with disappearing ink,

imagine being so literal that when told

to let sleeping dogs lie, you asked

how a Doberman could be dishonest,

imagine every smiling hint a girl ever sent your way

was in a prescription bottle with a You­proof cap

or a personal pizza delivered 30 minutes late

to the door of a boarded-up summer bungalow

then top that double dose of pepperoni

by having even the most casual conversation

served with Denali-sized asides of organic skew.

Fact: the US has 95,000 miles of shoreline,

but on this dinner plate the border between the Country

of Carrots and the Province of Peas can never meet,

say your brain is a slinky bullet-headed train

but your mouth is a horse-drawn Amish wagon

and what rockets across the endless gray rails

of your origamied cranium is ever projected

onto your grinning scrim of skin,

and maybe Ben Franklin didn’t

invent the Internet, but the Internet

has plenty pictures of him inventing electricity

which is almost the same thing,

say your friend Cynthia R. claims it will storm later

and you hear Oran Juice Jones singing

“I saw you (and him) walking in the rain”

and you beam a lighthouse smile,

only Cynthia says, “Seriously, I saw it on the news,”

while all you smell is full-length fur coats

matted by a downpour in MacArthur Park and

now Cynthia R. wants to know what’s so funny

but who can say Oran Juice Jones

without a concentrated face so you try

to collect the loose nickels and pennies

of thought spilling from your front pocket

but Cynthia fires up her smartphone

to show you the seven-day forecast

and now the foil-covered pots on the back

of her electric range are beginning to boil

and you say, “No, I believe you,”

but she believes in tone of voice the way Crayola

once believed in a peach crayon called “Flesh”

or the way banks believe in daily deposits

left by a river’s most assiduous visits.

Fact: the city of Pittsburgh has over 400 bridges,

let’s say you arch quick when softly pricked as

if any foreign finger were a cattle prod

and maybe Ben Franklin didn’t invent

electricity but he certainly earned a shiny penny

by cutting out the lights during thunderstorms,

only your steady tone is mono as a Sinatra single

on the platter of a hand-cranked Victrola,

and Cynthia cocks her head like a small dog

that is not boarding your single­-storied boat

and now you’re a wind-whipped antenna

on an empty dinghy bobbing dockside

as she steams out of range of your radio’s befuddled dial.