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.