FROM TAUTOLOGY SUTRAS

*

At the Bald Communist Schvitz Against Wage Theft in New Paltz

I begin to have second thoughts about praxis.

*

A grasshopper jolts along the length of my thigh 

only to tell me it’s really a cricket. 

*

I am not fit for most jobs in my red hoodie, 

but I sit high in the kingdom of Marsupials. 

*

The Non-Sequitur Convention was postponed 

for being a bowl of pudding. 

*

I didn’t mean to pontificate so wildly in the back of the Range Rover. 

I didn’t even want to be pontiff. It’s an ugly habit. 

*

Every barbecue is a portentous memoir. 

I, too, have been burned by the nude beach 

*

In French, the word for grape is raisin.

I have great reason to love and loathe this dry language.

*

The Fast and the Furious franchise 

but as Nietzsche contra Wagner. 

*

Near the reservoir, I stop to check my pulse. 

A grey rabbit thumps its rump against the rod iron. 

*

The banality of hemorrhoids may be our most unified condition. 

Suffering is most often posterior. 

*

As a graduate of bisexual hermeneutics, 

my interpretations go both ways. 

*

Arnold Schoenberg grabs the aux chord.

The party slowly swirls into a dirge. 

*

The rock dove is a bird of peace. 

Behold, how it desecrates our monuments. 

*

The bedbug has a penis shaped like a saber. 

We still have a lot to learn about violence. 

*

Unsure if Bernhard’s prose is the cause or the effect of my toilet troubles.

I only trust those who have written about death and died.

Eric Tyler Benick wrote the fox hunts (Beautiful Days, 2023) and co-founded Ursus Americanus Press, a publisher of shorter poetics. Newer work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bennington Review, Copper Nickel, Harvard Advocate, Mercury Firs, Puerto Del Sol, and Tagvverk. He lives in Brooklyn.