I trace my finger around. With red lipstick on I wear the skin of the pets I had, looking like a marigold shot through the head, my bare skin is barbed in the back. Such trouble and quiet with the wrap-around, the cross-walk, and floral shop as I browse. The white elephant in the upstairs bedroom, is making it hard for every one of us to sleep. With this Africa becomes a disease, that I unwrap from a cotton white sheet. When I breathe life is going good, under the spells of wicked and word. I like to call out in the night, so with no response I can plead for the courage to think; all the suburban philistines try to help me, but I can't tell a joke because I cannot read. Every thing amounts to being fat. Or liquidated in the most pathetic singles party for Karl Lagerfeld.

Numb fingers slur the words as I type telephone numbers that end in threes. I see a notice to be called upon, but it's hard to remember what day it is when your job only pays you in financial advice, "Don't do as I do, but please just do what I say." And I can smell that. The approach that a hunter brews in his midnight solemn cup of tea. Where a voice chimes in while a mouse runs out, dragging the corners of my eyes in a lagging meme, it doesn't do well to even be yourself sometimes, once while traveling I couldn't see. Come that morning I had left my hotel pass inside my favorite pants, black denim toting paint from a ******* shot, a picture that explains my disease.

The fifty inch fan hums an anonymous tune that when I turn quickly towards it becomes this feral baboon. And is it hardly based on fact or is it the illusions and the myths that Christopher Robins struck inside of me. With his griseous hands made of soot and of gouache, that worshipped animals that wear clothes outside. And even sometimes there are z's that transform into other creatures that hum real fast and talk out loud in nursery rhymes, a Whatsit and a Woozel are totally, too much for me. I turn the fan off and lay back down, and fight the world off with hands from another guy, much braver than I who doesn't even have tattoos but he's the top wordsmith from Buckingham. What a beautiful treat and such a magnificent surprise that the elephant lays down to die. Of course that's when my mouth dries up with smoke and my voice turns into the vanilla flavoring that everyone hates, and then too I felt like laying down to die. But I'm not 97 like I had thought I'm quite sure that I'm still alive. The white moon shines into my bedroom window at night and I pretend that I direct for the sky.

Black Rook In Rainy Weather

On the stiff twig up there
Hunches a wet black rook
Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.
I do not expect a miracle
Or an accident

To set the sight on fire
In my eye, nor seek
Any more in the desultory weather some design,
But let spotted leaves fall as they fall,
Without ceremony, or portent.

Although, I admit, I desire,
Occasionally, some backtalk
From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain:
A certain minor light may still
Lean incandescent

Out of kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then --
Thus hallowing an interval
Otherwise inconsequent

By bestowing largesse, honor,
One might say love. At any rate, I now walk
Wary (for it could happen
Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); skeptical,
Yet politic; ignorant

Of whatever angel may choose to flare
Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant

A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality. With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content

Of sorts. Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again,
The long wait for the angel,
For that rare, random descent.

The Response*

Even while flashbulbs go out, every now and then, we all must gather our arms and legs in a heap of human kindling, to rap tap tap on the downstairs neighbors door- for a set of candles, perhaps a chance to go completely insane for one terse moment when the hyperbole of vowels *just don't matter anymore.

And speaking of the sordid state of griseous gull-like creatures. Ravenous ravens gnawing outside the window of the kitchen table. How boring life can become, for at the moment, when we are not biting our nails, playing dress up, or playing doctor- all *******. Or maybe even burying our heads in the looks of rooks or with our noses brimming over with the tops of books.

The tea we have set in the study awaits us, as we all have to drink our tea some time.

Just don't leave the lights on baby. Who needs lamps at full lux at high noon any who? You, Mrs. Sylvia Plath Hughes? Maybe you ought to buy a book of stamps- at the nearest Hobby Lobby, pack a paper bag with an apple and a 'sammich', and list formally your complaints.

We can't all waste our time narrating other people's lives in the third person.

griseous risibility (the shrinkage of me, the hard way)


of course you're clueless
what the hll this means,
well, let your own fingers do
the pressing, cut & pasting,
my version, is the mockery
of me who grows grayer
daily, in every place, even
in the oddities where your
eyes cannot go, fingers can't
swipe, nor touche caresse,
alas, when I tell you, it's felt
in the tightening of the belt,
the squeezing of the vigor,
pressure on the mental vim

hiding under bed, doesn't
help the head, in fact, hesitate,
when you anticipate the congress
of neighbors called to get me
our from underneath, me, laughing
stock, the only stock I own that's
actually going up, yield to the
overwhelming defeat by the
totality grayness becoming
what's left of my shriveling self

cuddle, stroke pat & pet
what's left, of my disappearing
existential  marking of the spot,
in this ha! expanding uni-verse
of the shrinkage of me…
the hard way