Three Poems by Lori Cayer

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how do you know if you’re happy.
if you’re not. how do you.
if everything strikes you, literally.
and you worry about being afraid.
you twirl upon the economics of happiness
and. entitlement enters. correlates strongly.
a lot of it, it’s true, you can buy.
textiles, engorged baubles, architecture.
the diminishment of return
not linear but logarithmic.
you seem to know it best when you smooth
your feet into whatever you call bed.
turn a few pleasant pages before tripping
toward. the riparian ridge. between risking it
and falling asleep.

Refusal Conversion

you’ve gone so far, to search for love from your chair
cast for dropped traces, wiki-sexual, your place
in a place which does not, for all intents, exist

freefloat there, everyone does, find each other
joyful, privacies clearly stated, your own face
from different angles, midstream, mouth ajar

honest enough, in this squared light, nothing tells
the truth, you are re-questing, souls made showy
and complex, as heaven must be, if heaven were

also built by personal deposits, the end of practical
obscurity, admit you want it, this way, at night
look at, and into, save yourself, save as, send

Version Control

what you couldn’t think about, in another day
and age walking through the context of a volcano
in pursuit of an interpretation worth recording,
was,
that your future lover was ten, twirling and gathering
force the way pretty girls do in their ruffled rooms,
that,
already you were bronzed magnificent,
finest of lines making themselves known,
all the news fit
to blast out the side of a mountain,
and
you were the one
with the camera running downhill