an elderly man in Prague threw out
his Sunday paper, in the same trashcan
he always does--for a sense of order.
a northern mockingbird still lies dead
on the steps leading to our basement
door.
the epilogue of two November nights
tried to convince the third not to show
up an hour early.
the I Am caught a red leaf while in full
stride, then let it go a few steps later.
pumpkins with carved faces are
disappearing--while uncarved pumpkins
may see another month.
the Atlantic now wears Long Island like
a sleep mask--as a Great White draws
elusive parallels under cold waves.
a broken plate was found to
symbolize the connective tissue of
character development, in a bargain-bin
novel.

a witch's death mask turned up on the black
market--rumored to have shrunk herself, leaving
behind a thumb size cast.
ending up on the living room wall of an elaborately
detailed dollhouse, conjuring the whole transaction.
remanifesting like rot's backhand--her nose touching
her crutched chin, which conceals a sunken mouth
frittering away two teeth.
she pokes around the dollhouse with her *******
bouncing off her knees, as phlegmy laughter trickles
***** down bamboo stalk legs.
her *** is a wrinkly retraction, covered by strands of
white hair that appear fished-out of her skull.
she's just fertilizer patch, wet & wild about hell playing
dollhouse--& how wearing the death mask seems to
say something about her, even while pretending.
she must leave a few telling traces, so she peels off nursery
wallpaper--with leafy apples between slow to learn letters.
throws a black *** on a fireplace, making its flames shoot
up & fall like a timed fountainhead--caressing it as an
expectant mother would, the very joy of a spellbook.
until her fingers blister, and their swirlingly green prints
can be deflated--worshipping how dead skin clings to life.
then she slips into a plastic mirror & begins squeezing
blackheads from her overarching beak, until wormy ****
sprouts from the mirror.
flicked off into a limnal-drab sink, then climbs out of the
mirror & wills all her hair to shed.
exiting into the greater house to observe the man who
purchased her death mask sleep.

a rumpled gentlemen with his head on a desk--
the bent light of his mind snaps with an
aberrative upthrust.
Goya's: "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters"--
as bats fall to fly with a staggering jaggedness, the
twilight goes underground.
they're a flexuous miasma above the gentleman's head,
or like snakes climbing the glass of an aquarium.
a leathery dark with a bald purple gleam, smoked
clean through.
reveals the wickedly behooved whites of eyes,
expanding with what will be consumed.
this kind of sleep does more than warm death over,
the sleeper is made to watch himself do things--with
no electric blue escape route.

an amateur photographer waits till a room fills
up with degrees of connection--as people move
relative to prattle's false starts.
just when the deep space of universal greeting
collapses into conversation, the room's undulant
field registers unnatural spikes in noise level--
like supercells on a radar.
as if language showing first signs of fluidity, met
with the straitjacketed primitivism of listeners--
itching to go from zoo-like soundings, to being
seduced by the traction of their own voice.
at this the bluffy segue of wineglasses are tilted off
a tray--their long necks & lippy vaunts sparkling
to an ear-piercing parse.
a lens glares out of obscurity, as if the blue
shorts the blue--to blink back right there.
recoiling hands spastically thrown around deformed
hubs--with an anesthesiologist' catalogue of faces.
our photographer's delectation came from seeing it as
the discordia of the fifth wall.

Poe sits like meat locker Tummo,

in a flake's firepit--giving off snow's incense.

with his vest unbuttoned, wearing a t shirt

of Antarctica's: True South flag.

his elegantly racked face thinking of the seven

archangels, how all their names end with an: l.

necessitating the tongue to reach the mouth's roof.

his: "Philosophy of Composition" ceases dissecting:

"The Raven"--evermore (True North) is the same as

nevermore (True South).

the ****** trank of autumn duskiness--
creature features letting trees grip closeups,
that stand for a protagonist' last day.
screeching ques overexerted by alpha predation,
as horror's head classically wedges out from a
tree's hip--the day after.
flies walled in the gizzards of crisscrossing birds,
& an homage of costume flowers discarded
on damp mulch.
a cutthroat lack of resolution all along.
the inadvertent image of a grin below a chin--
drawn by creatures with their pointer fingers.
a slack-jaw totem pole augmented by an audience,
a stake driven into trackless woodland.
sleep paralysis on a  19th century canopy bed,
tightly drawn--changing with leaves.

convening floorboards grok the mover--

pitchy with unwanted presence,

as if the rapping light of a poltergeist.

alienated by the epiphenomena of their

own home, a hair-trigger mashup.

an implicate order "Truman Show" with

boundary issues, the nervous exhaustion

of omega pointed out.

deemed reductive overhead, & so on.