her face soft as fingers creeping on wood
there is the look of something
you never know
in the clean flow
of saliva where telemarketers trip
on my name like a banana peel
and i’m
sick at
brown midnight from mutations squeaking like piranhas,
but still i answer the phone.
and then my feet swivel and
splash in the blue dirty
under
streams, and from
interruptions in the crisp
pastry
of
the sun religions spill
down slopes
like newly hatched weather.
but, for
clarity, i don’t need full comparisons of
brain and spirit;
brute and saint;
abbreviations will do.
and war carries on.
and though i have an october face,
uncarved and
unpainted, you will
know me
by my tilt
in the field.
you will know me as
the first lick of alzheimer’s
nudges you like a
circling fly.
and then on sundays,
when so many gods are
sleeping, she pulls three
children along a dusty road
with tears falling to match
the setting sun and says
she has beautiful butterflies
for sale.
and i remember one
more time, the cops
saying it simply got out of hand;
it had nothing to
do with who they were
and
what
they weren’t. and then there’s the peace and omnipotence
of the dentist manipulating
the only
orifice that can kill us all.
and i still answer the phone.
celestial syncopation
a beveled head,
clam-shaped and archaic;
sungassed and melodramatic
is the conscience of a primitive frown.
and i’m bent on feeding the squalor puffed in
shallow streams
where dna was once a
hodgepodge
that lacked the gravity to spin a simple song.
one planet is never enough for
fingering calculus
or
stripping varnish
from a mass grave. i’ll
bring coffee
and sea urchins unable to swim. i’ll
remember
to tell the calendar of simple ores not
found in dirt.
and i’ll slip on a slurry of
shoreline nodding
at the ocean to stay away.
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