The Doorway From One Dark Room Into Another Dark Room

Who pushed the moon out on stage?
Who replaced my pillowcase with butcher paper?
The dust clumps rest quiet as coiled snakes.

I sit upright in my bed.
You can learn a lot by waiting in the dark;
about the antiquity of the dark, the agelessness of it.

Then I hear a sound like the shuffling of feathers.
A man walks by the door in a buzzard costume, head to toe,
dropping a few of the heavy black ones off his tail.

I’ll have to use the broom.

He doesn’t think I can see the blood underneath his fingernails, but I can.

The Garden

There is an obese man
walks through, hands stuffed in pockets, steady
with his flat stare
as he pounds the earth with his flat eyes.

The overgrowth of this garden, which clings madly
to the wire fence
like a beast
clings to
pretty underwear,

weighs in him. His eyes are blue and sad,
his lips
like loose hunks of steak.

The stink of weeds is immense.
They’ve released their burps to the enigma
honeybees.

Of course, they cannot see. None of them—they
walk with tiny canes

and the man is illiterate and crass.

The idiot

will immerse himself
in this semi-brilliance of
flora.

Highway

Witnessed a woman in white fur,
platinum blonde,
in the back seat of a
red car
blasting down the highway
turn herself inside out for us.
The halo must have swallowed the word, I thought; there was
tinsel on the rearview mirror, a snake in her undergarments

perhaps possessing

Time, consumed slowly and with
unhinged jaws

like an infant, or pygmy
hippo.

Madrigal

The rain had its purple fingers at my temples
and was massaging me to sleep.
I am enveloped in the night like a chrysalis.
My dreams are the dreams of pupa.
This is the madrigal of Spring—thoughts that
are no bigger than a hairball in the bathtub,
half a cucumber
sweating out its last silver wishes
in the fridge…

The contents of an old drawer
provide clues to the death of the afternoon:
a book of stamps, a tooth, a bunch of
weeds…a hollow exoskeleton.

I wake up on a mattress that is a fossil.
It rose out of the bedrock.

Madame Mothheart has blackmailed me
into this.

The Bone Puzzle

Curious.
Who put her together there?
I look down and marvel at my own
ape hands; my reflection in the mirror
is that of a carnival weight guesser. I’ve
aged almost sixty years.
I wonder how long I can exist like this.
As this. Requited for a one time
birth, a makeup drink,
pennies in the brown hands
of a man ordering pizza
as conquistadors in copper helmets
storm civilizations, establish ruins.
Someone finally will
envelope
Me. Yes. My pants will be pulled into the
ocean as I sleep.
The Words
will crowd around the light
like moths. The grove
of the dead will sing their anthem, and
What will happen
to the memories of rooms? Perhaps I’ll see them
as cells under a microscope, dyed brown, diamonds,
hexagons.
Houses?
My friends and family
will all be mannequins
wearing my clothes like costumes.

An Object Of Mass Entering A System

When it’s down, I tell you, the blood is crooked in your veins.
You extract a strip of brown gauze from your mouth
and examine it. It contains
a sequence of disfigured letters—they first were born,
then taken away from you.

My feelings are like a blanched squid; only the black eyes peeping out
and a velvety fungus at attention on my soft palate.

Clothes in piles are underhanded
as they scheme against me. Same with the clock; it hands
me
phony money
made of rubber, quizzes me
on the numbers of slants on imposing light.

A jewelry box with tasseled key
waits in the remote corner. Out of it
comes
a miniature conductor
holding a bone wand.

His crew unloads at the foot of the mirror
as he taps at his tooth, the only hard part of him,

and gets us to attention.

Report On The President Of Mules

Territorial pig. What have I done to deserve this treatment? I often confuse him with shadows. Stop it with your nuzzling of the clover, your canoodling
with spider web women.
The bow tie ‘round your pink throat is a fake; you bought it at a costume shop.

Who do I commiserate with
except a green horsefly I find sitting on the beach? His legs are crossed. He speaks in a low voice, grave, an accent—

the ocean pulled my friends in, he says,
and he is mournful. Now it’s laughing at him in green; the mollusks all sing fight songs;
the white old hair of the sea spreads like lightning;
the yellow feet of seagulls pace the black sand and demand food.

In the distance are the mountains. It is raining again. I don’t have an answer for him.

All this man can worry about is trespassing, he says. God, he’s down.

He’s got a dummy on his knee—you know that, right?--who delivers his speeches for him, and in the end,

how can you care for a creature like that?

Senator Of The Exhumed Guests

Somewhere in this space-like city, in the dry, spiny grass
that winter did not
chew
his elements sing in unison. A choir of Carbon, Oxygen etcetera.

Or on his knees, he wishes he lived in the rainforest.

Under rotting wood, fraternizing with the centipedes and dung beetles.

Army ants haul crucifixes ‘cross his breakfast table.

This widower eats his banana and says his wife’s name, which makes him
vomit, and he is joined by the council of apes.

They look at him as they cross things off of lists.
Why are they crossing those things off of lists, he wonders. And why
are they looking at me while they cross them off?

The shadow has come across
and the words are gone, they tell him.
Tonight we eat a tiger’s head for dinner.

I drift to sleep and feel drunk thinking about him. He

never stops
eating. He

takes huge steps through the storm and halts it like a dog.

Horror Quiz

This little deaf plant has shrunk. It’s more like a mushroom now. Shriveled
little womb

it contains a baby of brown smallness.

A dwarf comes out of a nearby door stirring soup with

What is that?

a stick? Or is that a rib, a spine with some teeth still left at one end?
She waves it at me

like she’s waving it at a Christ.

The sun is still up there; unshaded, hard, like a cyst
that haunts an organ.

Last

She went over and covered the house with a blanket.

Inside, tulips grew out of the family.

One lamp

served as the grave marker

for her parents, a

gray

balloon served as the grave marker
for

the tulips.

Looking At It

Solitude is shrunken like a white dwarf.

Collapse feels like hanging on.
The Universe

is visible in a set of drawers.

Watching A Cat Fall Asleep

It was 8 in the morning.
The muted sun had risen, of course,
like a blanched sand dollar, just a white disc out there
in between the trees.
And I had my own brain in my lap.
I was soaping it, massaging it,
I didn’t want my wife to see that—my sad little brain
being washed underneath the covers. I hid him in there
for his own good, and mine.
He was a secret; I kept him quiet with the end of a swiss army knife.
Somewhere, a violin and trumpet
bowed to one another and took off their hats.
Their heads were bloody. They put the hats back on.

Her eyelids pinch shut like a clam breathing, then
pop open, then close again. What is it in her
cat brain that fires?

God, I’ve really made a mess in here.
I’ll have to mop the floor and disinfect;
The chickadees will be invited as pallbearers;
Don’t call my mother. She’ll be too upset
to move.

Dry Wood

Can it either open or close, or both? Does it have hands?
Can it be both large and small, like my childhood
feverish vision? I held it in my mouth, whatever it was;
the sameness of both sizes. Closed hands on a rock, a
fly, one strip of grass.
Can its waves cross the desk and touch me?
My father glued it to a rock
along with a few seashells like little buttons,
looked at his watch in the wind.
In doing that, he opened it, and he closed it.
His hands occurred and then died, while
the ocean indifferently watched them
with its mustache and crew socks.
Back to etiquette.
Bow to the forehead of time, seagull, swinging
through the snow like a block on a rope.
The beach turned flat and regarded its people;
they were invisible and sat cross-legged like monks; they drank
glasses of milk like Stonehenge;
they prayed to the sand.
In their eyes, colors were flushed down the
toilets of their brains, remembering quietly the childhood
they had apart from themselves;
how often does a brain consent to something so outlandish?
It talks to the ax, it reiterates nonsense like facts, it kisses doom on the prick.
The forest on the outskirts stands upright and steady as a priest.
Clues received in the information of it all—cannot
possibly be read…
the glass rainbows, the prism interred.

The Ovation

Still stuck
like a sheet thread on a nail, like
a quill,
like your eyeball in its socket,

an entire earth
with gloved hand at its throat…

Thunder crowds at the door; let’s applaud.
As long as it’s

trapped
it can’t go away.