Caution

I do not recognize the man
eating in the courtyard.

He is a bodiless church
sitting there, the middle burned out
and just the roof left
and draped in
hair, skin, eyelids,
waiting for his meat to barbecue.
His arms and legs are down,
his mouth is open just a little bit.
It is as if he is on the edge of a cliff.
The smoke is representative of his thoughts,
they rise in some cipher,
cool and blue as his waiting viciousness.
My mind curls around him then
like a rope around a cinderblock.
Under us, the ants, the worms, the
rats crawl in some parade of death,
celebrating us and our meeting, and celebrating
how we’ll go on to sleep thinking
maybe, perhaps,
of one another.