How heavy, to carry a whole apple in one's eye.
My stomach holds,
maybe, some broth
if I am especially nice today.
Feet, a bit of smudged paint (but
only for a while) stems, an etching
of black,
only shades,
misbehaving deer eyes,
they above all will not cut it out.
How did this body become a drooping sunflower?
An oozing sapling? Who are all these shades, with loud buckets,
and what do they want with such young amber?
Syrup-maker, wedding baker, you succulent
succulent protector: tell me how you hold so
many sugar stones. Things are so tender am I
too tender to

I hover

Somewhere the phone starts ringing, loud,
it is early morning, we are in a Swedish room on a hard perhaps-good-for-you Swedish mattress, those goddamn Swedes, and
the phone starts ringing. It hurts the annals between my ears.
To be able to encase these records, hundreds, thousands, goddamn thousands, in tobacco and love-making and moldmust sleep, I need this. When I am awake, my thoughts poke at the bark of my eyes,
my eyes are always barking,
as the corners of books, incisors and pages, the encyclopedia of ugly and girlish suburban trauma.
You, asleep in cotton and the dirt of  mid-state, wrap
your square big boy hands around my ears. You do this and you are still asleep. You do this to keep me from hearing the morning news.

Suppose one could say I have spent my life looking up up up and up a bell tower. White kisses from pigeon ass, God's dandruff, the spit of an altar boy who licked church walls and found them lacking. These careen wildly downward into my hair. And maybe, for a long time, that phone would have meant that: news, bells, new news of coming bells, coming men, a coming cavalry I would tire of completely and spit in another's eye, I am so used to holding bad flavors under my tongue. And maybe I would have blamed you for robbing me of that, when you covered my ears. The frabjous day! But you knew something deeper, you knew I needed not to hear it, you knew and you were hardly you, asleep so square and thin with bitumite greek hair on a damp hard mattress. You continue, today I leaned against those prodigious man thighs of lightning while you slept. You continue to block out false bells, you opened that bow mouth and let loose some arrows: "You're my girl. Swear it?" The bells of rutting time.

Conquest of the Persian Empire

Prince,
I sleep on a bed of centipedes and sharp wood corners.

I sew meager pillows

from all the colors you leave trail to,

(from your sinews and frame of olive bone corners)

you trail burgundy,

and white and the nighttime fog that
is your breath you cover me, all titian. A titan.

What holds these colors is something like
mean cotton, 5-thread-count, it ages my face,

and in return you give me nothing.

You stomp in, Alexander, and say: "I accept you as a gift from the Gods!"

and all my centipedes scuttle away. Prince, your tongue laps at the salt
under my eyes and so the soldiers cannot be paid. Prince,
everything before you seems ashes. The Gordion Knot is
nothing, you say,
and rubbing your olive skin, I reach the pit of nothing--
an antediluvian domain.

My grief is mine my grief is mine my grief is MINE my grief is MINE my grief is MINE MY grief is MINE MY grief is mine MY grief is mine MY grief IS mine MY GRIEF IS MINE MINE MINE MINE

I am the Fat Man. He is starving for sugar
and opens his artery
and drinks and tastes honey
in his blood,
thank god,
it is so sweet.

Maudlin Madeline lies in the backseat
of an auto. As the auto bowls through
an ace bandage high way Madeline opens
the door. Plains rush by and her head is upside down.
She thinks, I need a haircut. She knows,
I have no money. As maudlin Madeline
lies in the backseat she sticks her out of the door and her hair drags along the road.
When the auto hits a pothole and
her head comes clean off her neck,
we DON'T say, "What a tragedy,"
we do say, "What a fool."
It is stupid, stupid, stupid to
trust the road to behave itself.