on an Easter Sunday,
her shoes plead for the dew
for clippings which cling with a springtime ferocity
a will to be anywhere else

and the rabbits lose their way
they haven’t the time
shimmying, as they do, down foxholes,
slick with dawn’s water
and passing, like ships
in some night they shan’t see
dying free but not beloved

now, every girl’s a Katherine
cut down to a size
which necessitates the trailing taste of some sir’s name
and induced by the sheer restlessness
of a christened bed,
Katie B. commandeers playgrounds
when age is tender
and scrapes more common than a kiss goodnight

all the while,
our little daisy sits in a half-baked garden
the deer will not keep secret
without pockets for Polly
just stitched up renderings she abhors
but not as much as she ought to
and will
come the times of cocoa butter and zirconia

she speaks in hushed tones
on the outs with an imaginary friend
and worried about making Mommy even more so
she clasps the back of a baby-haired, sun-stung neck
bath-puckered fingers sliding down fishtail rungs
with no concept of frenching
no concept of anything, really

except, that the taste will be a bitter one,
when it does come
when she stops beating or drops dead
having rolled with the punches he named passion
why should she be free
when she could be beloved?

we could only be in love
by nature of convenience
our reptilian brains plucking crickets
from a crowd
and praying to get lucky

the seven seas
just now surpassed by the eight billion bugs
leaping down into the dirt
not deep enough to hold them

the jig was up
and luck was down
when I found a simple soldier
crawling for his life
on a driveway leased to the boy who loved me
flailing in the dark and the smog
just before summer sunk its teeth into us both

what could I do but save him?
in spite of myself
instead

more and more
I find myself in his arms
and reflected back in dancing pupils,
glowing with promise
such as I’ve never seen
in all my few, full rotations
I wonder at the composition
singing technicolor in his brain
razing his dreams down to woodsmoke
and I know that I will only ever be fire
gone wild
singeing his sparsely-haired forearms
blazing scorched earth to fertile ground

red cars go by
just whooshes in the exhausted wind
the sun poses for the watercolorist, politely, then hurries down to its little death
and there’s a telephone pole
just outside his window that I’ve never seen,
never had the presence of mind to notice
“I love you.”
once of honey, dripping off his lower lip
now so stale that the moths fly about it
but they’ve nothing to do with me, this kind
I follow the flame
crumbs could never sustain me

the artists walk, in large part, unseen,
when they’re not crawling along
the pavement,
which crests and falls with the laughter of so many tectonic plates,
so many eviction notices ignored
painters, the lot of them,
but they will never tell you so
they’ve far too much doubt,
too much fear of death,
and far too little time to seize the laughter—so contagious to the crows
and their ****** spree
for shiny things of little, less consequence.