Waking, like drunkeness: you move your head, you move
your eyes, and it seems even now the keys to this old
machine needlessly stick, like the first cigarette
of the day on the back porch of your rental
condo. First off, there's a pinkish
purplish plush bunny hanging over her desk,
just hanging, as if in opaque glass eyes
one could catch the trot of birds or of
the elderly out walking: "Well…

he said you have a lot of bacteria in there,"
invoking the thunderstruck of already paled
mythologies. But these voices down here
in what they must think is southern, but surely
(you tell her) is a middled distress, muds
of now's an empty stomach, with coffee
tart in its pit (you complain) must gladden you,

or if not that at least provide a similar sense
of well-being, like an erection in the blankets
while she still sleeps, a ridiculous protuberence
that sticks straight like a hounded limb to tent
the bedclothes, of which there are none:
none but for the grace of god go I.
She was right, though: all you need is a few
spoons of nutrasweet, the rest
is some concocted trajectory or film
about the eyes which participate
in hunger as well, levitating
while smoking and edging the knees just
so, to hide the old pipe from their
morning walks. She starts to think of
the words for each object on his skin:

"throat";"spore";"aerobics." It won't
do any good to fake persona today, though
the coffee strengthens teeth, and teeth shore up
his embalming labia, ballasts of sardonicism
gets warmed off in the rain of her illness on
the blank sides of these trees here, the rains
which their creek needs to suffocate the slighter fish
with sufi teachings. And all along they had been

talking out ecstasies.

I can barely see the flame on this new lighter now.
I'm talking
out the side of my mouth, which means something down
here I
think, the wry limp of the welders, the carpenters
swathed in
sawdust suddenly needing his pack of the day. He would
silently
pluck his 12-pack of Michelob off the counter,
grabbing with his
other ornately forearmed tattoo hand the three packs
of Marlboro
Reds he also purchased daily, totalling usually
somewhere between
fourteen to seventeen dollars. I must have known
somehow that
trees today would be something like bowed mists; that,
in the
bowers of the canopy vague train stations took shape
with the
same notes of their departures and entanglements,
until something
like rhapsody approached, stopped mid-step in the snow
of
blossums like that crown of magnolia she took into the
car,
hoping the day's heat would set it ticking out scent,
measuring
in almost lucid wafts the way the day rapes parallel
impunity
when it does.

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