convenience store shuffle,
the aisles lurk with a menacing sameness,
my friend’s pockets inflated with saccharine booty.
-miss kim is doing a sentry’s duty.
busted, in good measure,
my friend lacked the initiative
to impress a model minority
but there are no handcuffs this time
-only a requested apology.
we would troll suburbia
on a vague quest for poetry,
enter copycat mega malls
and vainly seek out haikus inscribed
on just-wiped food court tables.
we would invade yet another gas station,
in an optimistic search for sonnets
scrawled onto cracked porcelain
only for customers toilet seats,
we would wander uninvited into a pawn shop
and look for a semblance of rhythm and beats.
the last time i got pulled over
for driving under the speed limit in suburbia,
i told the officer he had no right to remain silent,
that any poem he did not instantly recite
can and will be used against him
in a court of verse.
convenience store shuffle,
the lurking aisles illustrate no sense of meter
as i shoplift freely in quatrains
-there are handcuffs this time
and miss kim is not emily dickinson.
