I bite a green guard
as the invisible nurse sings

to my hand full of spices,
& I'm ejected into a sea:

slow as hadal whale fall
I snow into plural black

that teems with grim promise:
someday I'll return here

without a nurse's silk road
escape route in my vein.

I wake to an ulcerous world,
my cotton gown no shield at all

against the dark aquarium
of dense sleep that I now know

slouches with thickened shapes
that devour dreaming eyes.

X is dragging the body of the
dead history professor, a man of
enormous girth and monstrous
height, through the empty

landscape, then the vast ocean
appears and X drops the body
into the water, where a shark
whose ancestry is four hundred

million years old, eats it, as X
recalls the professor’s sleepy
eyes, artificial smile, and
remarkably unreliable memory.

Strange thought before a surgery:
we're all guests signed in to visit  

at a nursing home for the gods -
we make our obeisance and tell them

of our doings and goings,
but they're feeble-minded, rheumy,

ensconced in cloudy rockers,
not watching or listening, perhaps

they reminisce on discarded cosmos;
we're forgotten, or, worse,

acknowledged but irrelevant -
either way they'll share no wise.

I feel only silence without and within
as I lie down on the paper bed -

casual as ice, the doctor carves
away the excess swim from my *****,

by needle, knife, and fire -  
his third on a humdrum Friday.

I gaze through ache at pock-faced ceiling -
it gazes back with dead fluorescence.

I sneak a look at a lustrous dwarf star
that caught me in its shining net

like an uncommonly nonchalant fish.
I limp to the car, up the stairs,

befriend the bottles of null,
the pocketless black: the new me.

it has been storming so often

in the evenings he rolls over the city

so come down and meet me;
in the rain if you must--

I am too raw to do much else

most things ***** and push

but if this is the dust of your feet
then I'd lie in your wake

on the hammock this evening
the west pasture filled with thick
mulberry clouds, framed by sheathes of
apricot mist in drapes

I am watching the leaves of The Cottonwood
shimmer, flip their golden underbellies up
like schools of danios

And I’m talking to God about being alone—
I send a couple videos to Alyssa

Somewhere on Central some young boys
rip down the backroads up Fields on
their little bikes, setting every dog off in
the copse mobile home park

it’s not that I’m not grateful

No messages. Just wind, late evening.
Sunday with the Lord.