Strange times. When I speak of caressing your mantic lungs
I don’t know what I mean, but I know
I would hurl you under proper circumstances.

Darling, one whisper falls from a tree silently
so as not to wake the ghosts from their siestas.
Your robe has holes I can’t write of. I can fathom
getting there, what that might entail, wrapping,

as I am prone to, my fingers around your furry pincers
while I wait for you to read my rights to the ceiling fan

who whirls above our renovated combustions like the glowering
eye of our Lord upon the teary-eyed wicked.
I am not looking to escape through the window, darling.

I am diving for your diamond-in-the-rough, peeling off barnacles,
making moustaches of seaweed. You threw it into that ocean-
sized trough in which you drown lizards as way of
stress-release. I don’t know what I’ll do next.

The poor man. You give me your hand,
darling, and your robe, your robe is shiny like a pubescent star,

and it shimmies like a wagon piecing itself apart, as you
piece yourself apart, starting with your smile, which was always more
like a photograph of a dune in a textbook.

You give me your hand. It is a blue egg
dusted with microorganisms. I sprinkle it with our fragrance,
what’s left of it. I wish happiness upon your sleep-life, doldrums
upon your late-night haunting. I am tired and these

machines are so convenient, bringing me on all-expenses-
paid visits to the site of your burial. Or is it your sister’s?

I quote, my heart is like a walled onion.
The poor man is tired. It is not 1904 anymore.
You are not smiling anymore, darling, but you give me your hand.

You give it in a basket with parsley and cheese
and cut-outs from The Waterlogged God.
You give it almost grudgingly but I will keep it.
You tell me you’ve been dreaming again of train stations.

I wonder what that means.
I wonder about your eyes.

There are many spiders inside the wall, and along it,
and on the chandelier’s fingers, and inside the spiders.
I quote, a dream is worth a thousand dustpans, but you,

darling, are worth so much more than dustpans.
But I grow weepy, as stated. What do those dark blue lines mean?
Your fingers, darling, smell of a dark cloud in an electrical storm.
Your palm is a circus. Your nails ticket stubs.

That one’s from the alligator show. You dislocated your
throat. I had a plan. If you stare into someone’s eyes for

more than six seconds, you’ll want to lick them.

I like slandering your makeshift forceps.
I hammer you down with watery *** and then spill

the remainder on the couch. Yarg! A diamond’s
worth at least a small intestine, and you

are worth whatever’s left over after night
has upended itself, poured sideways out of its

shellacked crawlspace, and turned the basement sour.
There are remnants of you in the park,

some red stain by the baseball field where,
if you’ll remember, you watched little leaguers

build teamwork, and faint splotches on tree bark
from your lactations which, if you’ll remember, happened

every morning. I whisper your godforsaken name
and am slapped in the head. The children cry

when I smile. I cry when the children smile. Good
heavens. I forbid you from not entering my corridor,

even as I set up a barricade. I like my water scalding,
my passion chilled, and I like you in easy-to-

swallow doses. I like you in my eggs.
Ditto the faucet, keyboard, the occasional lily,

but do not mess with my pearls. I mumble of apodictic
meadows while I sleep. What can I say?

I do not mumble of unclogging your bathtub,
which has a certain foul repute, and has grown

heavy and ugly with your hair, which is everywhere,
just as you are everywhere, and wherever, and so

******* hidden it’s not funny anymore, we stopped
looking some millennia ago, after scouring the drainpipes,

kicking down your doors, dissecting your mattress,
speculating about your burial site, etcetera, and even so

we have not been really looking all this time, have we,
just blaring your name through the speakers,

putting wrong numbers on our calling cards, leaving
uncooked meat out on the back porch as if you were

a raccoon, oh, or a lion, which you are not, or not
quite, though, as the books say, you have honey

in your stomach, and if you could but be
ripped open we would taste and see.

For example: the frogs
find a dinner plate, and an acorn
makes funny gestures from beneath the dirt.
And the string twangs, as was expected.

How simple, how unlikely to happen to us.
Only a misplaced vector connects
the pine tree’s yowl to the sandbox,
which, if you don’t think about it, is alright.

I get confused so many times
before I stop and train my thoughts.
And again: the sound I hear
is either walnuts cracking or red birds

splashing into windows. But
the movements have been extinguished
and the two are so dissimilar they may as well
be the same. Or watermelons

stomping insects underfoot. In
the other room of this house is a man
walloping a rooster with a broom,
but the rooster is too scared

to tell him just how effective
positive thinking is, just as oceans
are too murky to provide freethinkers
with a useful metaphor.

Of course not, said a man
lifting his cat from pool. But then
it was too late, and something
was pulling whimpers through the air.