All the Made-Up Words Walt Whitman Didn’t Get To: Manahatta was just the beginning

Manahatta

I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city,

Whereupon, lo! upsprang the aboriginal name!

Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly, musical, self-sufficient;

I see that the word of my city is that word up there.

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Disneep

(The unsettling feeling when the toilet seat is still warm from the person before you)

The borrowed warmth of that white cylinder seeps with quiet urgency

Into the wooly flesh of my resting thighs

And behold, I find my self filled

With deep and sudden discontent.

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Premptiphona

(When you wake up right before your iPhone alarm )

Oh! the sweetest quiet of unbrok’n morning

The blessed, gentle silence

In absentia of mariachi jingle.

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Piquase

(Drinking from the shorter drinking fountain at the gym because the taller one has bad water pressure)

Thy stream! I bend myself to breaking

To gift my sweatened lips with sips of joyous hydrat.

Even in this benten carriage, what joy to be blessed

By the grace of such symphonic moisture.

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Caucistance

(Resistance of the urge to start a podcast)

Lo! With clench’d jaw and tighten’d fist

The strength of resolve swells within my beating chest

And I tell Chad I shall not join him

In his reviewing of cinema Tarantino.

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Ubrilent

(When you call for an Uber and the driver doesn’t try to talk to you)

What unrival’d joy, what unbridl’d happiness

Such freedom is but too short lasting

For this, my fifteen minutes spent in silence,

I give him five stars.

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Lakshminskeep

(When you see the face of an NPR host and it is not what you imagined in your head)

The kinship I have considered mine

With these, my long held podcastal friends–

The dulcet tones, the fry of vocals–

Is now naught to me but a great fraud

As I fin’lly see a glimpse of photo,

So unlike my own imaginings.

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Blashno

(The moldy berry at the bottom of the container)

Thy beautiful rounded juice sack, tainted and stained

Bears the brunt of Adam’s curs’d flaws.

Filled with nectar, yet coated in blueish mush;

I weep for the loss of your passing.

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Titilia

(The overwhelming sensation of having too many tabs open)

My eyes whisk in glazed caucophony

In the piercing glow of o’erfilled screen

Whether to pin, to close, or to read–

A blue light filter, I soon shall need.

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Masculeind

(A handshake that crushes your fingers like they are made of peanut brittle)

M! that great zigzag, that sternest of motions,

I feel my knuckles

One by one, succumb with their great snapping

Oh horrid! The crushing of those fragile digits!

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Friddisome

(The temperature inside a movie theatre in Midsummer)

I shudder in this fearsome tundra

With weather so mean, so sniped and biting

The bears polar would not be misplaced in such habitat

I sip my jumbo Diet Coke and ponder.