Zip up the tux
and put it back
in the body bag
it came in

we danced, but
it didn’t make things
more real

i, with my
fake, dead skin –
someone else’s –
and you with your
cute pigtails

“make sure
you return
the body,”
mom said.

this is all we are
skins under death
someone else’s passion and style
we fit the frame

triangular shoulders
show stability
i hope:
please tell me you notice

death provides me with
a sense of being
just because it reminds
others
of someone i’m not

I hope you notice –
Now, this:
This is who I am.
I am capitalized,
With proper grammar
And order.

I walk down the *****, populated hallway with the vines growing inside and out of it and I see my reflection in each passing door. I live just down there — not five feet; hardly taller than me, but not older. I exemplify my worries of the dark by shivering away, jammering teeth and tingling coins in pocket screaming familiar songs into my ear.
       A door opens, and for a second, we all hear the universe: all of us, out in the hall. A crystalline rod – the thin kind they use in labs or bars to stir drinks together (both of which are alchemy) – snaps, pouring a silver liquid into the hand of the person who leaves his room. With insanity he glowers at the speed of the gods. Echoes of the word “quicksilver” mutter down the hall, motors flare, and explosions go off.
       Each room is the same, but different: infinite capacity with different chemicals, different chemistry, and different emotion.
       Afraid, I turn the **** of my own cell, and I enter one billionth of myself, and I am myself. Stammering within my own mind, I quell my heart with symphonies of norm, letting flow thousands of flying fish from the forefront of the fantastic sound.
       It does not matter that other people have the same room as I do; it only matters that their rooms are different. Their rooms are cages, as are their hearts, as are their hands. The man in the hallway (short, stubby thing with eyes like a deer) blows ether from his mouth upon the liquid metal in the palm of his digits, and it floats down the way like baking powder or how I’d always imagined snow would look in a blizzard. I can hear all this, and I must divide myself from the whiteness it brings. I hate the bleak mornings it makes.
       I would like to open the door and show the silver-to-white stuff that I, too, can throw a gust at things and have them take flight, but it is not the same. Today is a world with solemn toast -- intimidating those with brains.

hope crumbles like
leaves in the fall
It seeps from emerald and orange-brown, the
show of coral in the Caribbean Sea.
Melancholy gathers in the veins of the fisherman
taking a ******* the seashore.
He, as many, put lead arms over the sea. Twin
suns intertwined, produce solar flares of
sea-blue and scarlet changing the air.
Too bright ----
Ruby and sapphire pour through pores
like oxidized blood flowing from an open wound.
Four black mountains,
molehills---
depends on who names them.
Blue-green the sea washes back unto itself
carrying away drift wood as
happiness carries sadness with heavy hands.

On some distant island
The fish swim –
In the air
And upside-down.
And they talk like people
And they talk unlike people
And they always look silly.
I’m sure of it.

I know because I want to know.

Has a curious vision-arrow ever glanced your eye,
Forsaking your pupil and enjoying your iris?
One or two have mine.
I think to the bowman always:

A black hole, and at least as complex,
But not a hole of darkness.
Nay, in my own, I see the fish.
An extravagant concavity that appears convex.

Eye – flipped funnel
Man – flipped funnel
The mind works like class notes,
Disheveled.

A realm of those aqueous creatures
Can’t be possible and
Must be possible because
I want it to be.

Even holes are filled with earth, air, ether
Even funnels.

Who is to tell me
That my fish can’t have their reality elsewhere?
Some infinite alternity where
Things go and are made
And holes, filled, are emptied?

Who to tell me?
A man who sees colors
To describe to a man who sees black
Some ethereal place
Which is neither black nor color?

No.

On some distant island,
The fish don’t fly –
They swim in the air.

I promise.

All the wild ones are gone.
Their feral claws and nymphatic strings
Drug through the earth they held so dear and
****** underneath the waves

An Atlantean world of
Great sound and rush of current
A blue land with little breath
****** underneath the waves

Sound goes not from water.