I am the dead man,
lying face down on

the living room floor,
blood running from

my ear, a used
ticket to the

opera in my pocket,
a recently retired

insurance adjuster,
never married, and

on the blaring
television

the blundering, but
lovable sit-com

character, does a
slapstick prat-fall, and

on the floor the dead
man’s broken drinking  

glass that was
half full or half

empty, which amounts
to the same thing.

This is after the
grandly mundane
drama, after the
endless timeline,
after the tallying,
after the lure of
the handcrafted,
kettle-cooked salty
potato chip, after
the endless conquering
of it and them, this
is after the hypnotic
spell of perfumed
images, after
being a verb disguised
as a noun, after
pretending to be
a palpable thing,
this is after  
being something, and
this is after
being nothing.

Five things
that I know
about her:

the uncharted
bottom of
the ocean,

an algebraic
equation
in the guise
of a woman,

a woman in
the guise of a
summer rain storm,

a poem
written with
disappearing ink,

she flows around
immovable
objects and
back to the sea.

From her window the
pale, willowy young
woman, a midwife,
watches a paper cup
being tossed around in
the wind. The dark ocean,
the great progenitor
in the background,
illuminated by waning
moonlight. She waits
for his headlights
to appear, her fiancé,
a fleshy, ruddy man,
the town’s undertaker,
who brings freshly cut
carnations, and a
long, warm embrace.

I’m a fashion model turned actress and in my new

movie I play a cave-woman, a Neanderthal, whose clan

is massacred by a bunch of ****-sapiens. It’s a tragic love

story—my character was in love with a handsome ****-

sapien who ends up being one of the killers. It’s a

group dynamic thing. In real life, my boyfriend is a

stock-broker. I swear that guy can predict the future—

in terms of business. He makes a killing in the

market all the time. And he looks like a male model—

I’m not kidding! Anyway I hope you’ll go and see

my movie. The working title is Neanderthal, A Love Story

but we’ll see what happens with that down the road.

They are on a mountain
at the edge of the world,

on her white parachute
draped on the ground under

the cherry blossom trees,
naked, vulnerable, while

down in the valley the
trees are on fire, even as

the oceans are swelling
and flooding the coasts,

and they feel the fever
in the air, the infection

in the atmosphere, and
as soon as they patch

his balloon and ignite
the flame, it will float

away in the hazy air,
to who knows where.

Our plight.
Instinct
lost, life
drifting, like a
paper airplane
swept away
on a breeze.