To another day
passing like the parched foliage
dangling from the roofs in
the ***** Bronx

left of the ferry,
right is the skyline
doubled three times,
cloaked in solar panel
glass and shimmering
against the smoggy array of light
that
will
quit—
in due time.

Daddy, sweet
East River father,
where is the little
meatball you had grounded
up for eyes.
For a Roman nose
and Mafian stubble
when your Sicilian tongue
was clipped at age five.

For English-Only stamped on the roof
of your waste factory
of a mouth.

For the neo-tongue that
was bred liked
strong As
and
young ****;
And copious liquor upon
the grounds of your hiking
trips.

Mutation
       of
vile majesty.
Cannibalism of the **—

Buttons budding
for *******.

I saw your phantasm
figure, soiled in
dark tan, curve in
my lens.
Swallow the hazel
like a viscous sauce,
sweet, fresh.
A fuckable baby—
of five. You clipped
my tongue with now
cloying giggles and in the bunk bed,
red and ***,
like a locket, limbs

dangling out the sides, fleeing in
a fountainhead of
DO NOT.
Effaced by an amnesia.

The old man in my skull speaks,
— I was thirty two days ago.

Now the IVs DRIPDRIP,
Chorus with the TICKTICKTICK.
You are the hour,
I am the minute
Hand.
You are slow, I must
go-go-go in compulsive haste.
Run for sixty,
start anew,
encore, solo, imbrued
with the days that twine the middle, framed in
white.
Forget.

The doctor parses the old man like an
obsolete phrase with theatric hands,
-touch-touch-
push,  press.
Then comes the Shakespearean
soliloquy:
—He hasn’t the coverage.

The trigger as a glove of flesh
hits its target, quiets the machine,
puts me to sleep.

What is it that
I must do?
-become the platoon,
an infantry of sun-empired men.
Fight the shrapnel,
the blitzing of
scar tissue.
Become the fireman
with an axe wielded—
Scale the towers like cracks in a mountain.
Die from the smoke or
the spherical flames of the
planes that rode like the hooves
of a horse with bubonic pallor.
Fall like a worker
for stories down until
God, or some sadistic keeper
of this earth, slacks a noose
and reels me in like
a bluefin tuna, prized,

as you
salute. You ‘Nam
prevailer heralding
the lacy harlequins of corporeal
God’s pardon
on
you.

I am in
eternity from
the waist down,
object of the tight, frictiony
satisfaction you
almost indulged in.

To be a daughter, so sonly,
revoked of all features.
Stripped of the places
you liked to touch.