I WILL NEVER FORGET THE WAY OUR FACE LIT UP

We ran for our lives from the burning maze,
and the bullets smacked the walls of the alley
and the tear gas filled our lungs and bits
of sheet metal and tusk cut our bare feet.
I will never forget the way our face lit up
the morning the seperatists took the maze,
the morning we made our escape.

They didn’t offer us water.
Remember how in the dark together
we sealed burned sheets of aluminum foil?
We balanced these delicate, leaking vessels upon
our heads as on the banks we stood,
the wash jammed with the swollen carcasses
of black pelicans, victims that ate hardened,
antifreeze-douzed grease till their bellies tripled
and they floated away.

Behind the slaughterhouse, on the sides
of the broken down livestock were scrawled oaths.
Let us remember these oaths:

The only oath I can remember is Quedame en Richmond.
It being a time of revolution water was scarce.
It being a time of revolution there were separtists.
I can still see you skipping a step to jump
over the unlucky shoes that filled the streets.
I can remember another oath:
Peter has a small dick, and he uses it for bait.

Now let us bow with our face to the curb,
and our nose to the asphalt:

Dear Lord why is it today the clouds are laced
with gold and the valley is filled with smoke?
Do you remember how together in the dark

we sealed burned sheets of aluminum foil?
Do you remember how we balanced the delicate,
leaking vessels upon our heads? As children we ran
naked through the streets. As old women we grab
at water skins held above our heads. I do not think
we are really old women. We might not have been
children really at all. Dear tree please humble us.
Dear wire please warn us, then warm us, then go on.
Until then.

leaking vessels upon our heads?
As children we ran naked through the streets.
As old women we grab at water skins held above our heads.
I do not think we are really old women.
We might not have been children really at all.
Dear tree please humble us.
Dear wire please warn us,
then warm us, then go on.
Until then.

WATCH ME DIG A HOLE (ODE TO THE JERUSALEM CRICKET)

I

The children of the soil
with their humanoid heads
only come out at night
or when someone is digging.

II

They come out to feed
on the soft tissue of plants
and the dead.

III

They catch horsehair worms that
make them thirsty, worms that crawl
out of their faces into the water
to mate.

THE ARITHMETIST GOES FISHING

one

On the cleanest gravel bars
red-sided trout spawn, then die.
The largest females fall back
to the water with loud smacks
that loosen their packed and round
seven-thousand-egg-bellies.
This morning is cold, our lines
freeze if left too long on the
water.

Sweating.

A man’s foot

pedals a cast iron cart
overloaded with cages
crammed full of ratty female
pigeons over the curb,
down into the street. A bus,
here from a failed five-year plan,
swerves, its fender hooks and shakes
the man off his heavy cart.
Under momentum of pig-
eon, the cart lurches over
the man’s ankle. The ankle
is limp beneath the flat tire,
and folds on itself as do
our iced lines fold this morning.

two

The fishing was no good, we
were sick from the green water
sliding down the canyon. All
things spun, including my eyes.
I turned around in time to
see the river split open.
I watched a deer lose its hair
all at once. I watched a truck
spin on end like a cue ball.
I watched dogs attack the deer
as it shivered without hair.
The truck exploded on fire.
We dug holes in the road and
filled them with deer hair. We spun
off the bank, into the mud.
There you found green clay, there I
found red clay, my boots still stink.
You slept in a puddle. We
became tired and laid down
ourselves eventually.

three

“Hey umm, hey everyone,” you
say and the moose crashes through
the run you were fishing and
wobbles down the river toward us,
moving fast like telephone poles.
We make it up the slick bank,
the moose lopes over the ce-
ment barricade and onto
the highway.

Someone in a

cargo van stops in front of
the confused moose, blowing
the horn over and over
again.

You say, “If I were

up there on the road I would
put a rock through their fucking
windshield.”
four

“You awake?”

The grass

was dry and yellow because
this high up fall comes fast and
winter is soon thereafter.
“Nope.”

“I could die here.”

The cut-

banks of the small, deep creek lean
over the water.

If one

was quiet and flat against
the dry grass, dangling only
a short length of line into
the water, stunted and hook-
jawed brook trout, orange and white
stripes lining the tips of their
green fins, threw themselves onto
the bank and your heart would twist.
“I am afraid I just might.”

five

In the grass growing in the
shallow bends there are herons
with clothes hangers in their beaks.
This makes casting difficult.
This is as you describe it:

The road across and along
the far bank was packed solid
and slick with thick sheets of ice.
He said he had broken the
reel seat off his rod this fall.
He told me to be careful
and I fell hard, bruised my hip.
It was tough to get my feet
under me.

Six sandhill cranes

were squawking at a pair of
pruning shears sunk in the slough
and rusting up the water.
One of the cranes had been shot,
and as it squawked, its cracked
beak vibrated like the reed
of a feathered and stick-legged
clarinet blowing angry
at junk sunk in a rusty
slough.

I looked up to see the

old man’s feet shoot out and to
his left.

His head smacked the ice

with a hollow sort of plop.
He didn’t move after that,
but I could hear him moaning.
When I got to him blood was
foaming in his ears, and small
owls were picking his pockets.
I cursed away the thieving
birds, propped him up, and asked him
when his birthday was.

He said

“I am sorry, I know the date,
but I can’t tell you it now,
I must have slipped and fallen
on the ice.”

I hung his arm

over my shoulder and dragged
him across the bridge to a
trailer stacked with railroad ties.

While you took and wrapped your coat
around the old man’s shoulders
every magpie in the sky
fell head first into the ground.

six

“I gave it a shot, I mean
I haven’t talked to her in
a week, but I just can’t have
someone all the time asking
me what I’m feeling or what
I’m going to do.

She gave

me a bunch of chances, I
gave her one and that’s enough.”

seven

This morning is bitter cold
like the day the old man slipped
and hit his head so hard on
the ice, like you picking up
the rock, like being burried
in the meadow, like the man
in the oily street holding
his crushed ankle, begging those
walking by for help as I
and the bus move down the street
out of sight, like a deer leg
in a dog’s mouth, like dumping
water out of your boots in-
to the snow, like a lime kiln.

for adam, mike, jason, and peter

EAT THE CROW

I have disapointed everyone and my mother.
I spoke of twins, both gray and pink twins,
I drank a can of air freshener from Mexico
Aerosol de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe
and I puked on a horse. I put a frozen rose
in my pocket and flopped out the door,
rubbing the rose on my face and growling
at the seamstresses about this winter weather.
Lately I find myself flopping all over the place,
over bicycles, down refrigerated streets,
through meat packing plants, out of the bus
and off to the mortuary. I figure hey-fuck-it
this crooked back is my crooked back,
I could paint my head red, or I could go out
into the world and find a good place to shit
like everyone else. Instead I go on about you
to some bald asshole with poet monogramed
on the lapel of his fat head. He kept
picking up the phone and accusing my mother
of biting off his dick. At least she
didn’t really bite off his dick. At least I
fooled some of them. At least now
I know I will quit trying to fool myself.
I have missed someone. I have missed you.
So that is everyone, Mother, you, everyone else:
dissapointed. A while back I rolled down a roof
and flopped through a plywood Spanish campaign sign.
I gave that to you.

DRINK UP

This afternoon a person might call a few
friends and say none of these sprinklers
are needed, these trees could go up in flames
quite quickly, this is a drought and we all know it,
the crickets are eating their own weight every day.

Could have seen you reach in your pocket with
one hand, unfold the blade with two hands and
with one hand shake the knife as though it were
a dowsing stick. But there are few patches of cold
air between now and there. For now

I have shut off the swamp cooler, I have
thrown up in the sink , and I have scratched
each deerfly bite. At most I will be hot,
hungry and daubing my welts with tissue for
the fifteen more days I cannot speak with you.

At least I will be distracted. There is a Mexican
girl sobbing loudly on the curb. Her lover
holds his nose over the wet lawn, the blood
leaking between his fingers has stained his
undershirt, they are nearly at arms length.

IN THE CAPITAL

The circular saw sings in memory of
the brick’s demise. In the capital
the electric drill spits dust for the scaffolding’s
plunder of the slick, sodden alley.

Unto man in the capital is appointed death.

The capital’s streets cobbled with horse hooves.
The capital’s storm drains plugged with pigs’ hair.
The capital’s municipal pools filled with ox blood.
To the capital death has come to offer

judgement. Patricide arrives here early
on knobby knees, quietly carrying water.
Across its back walks Punishment. Soon both
are tied in a sack with one monkey, one cock,

and one serpent. Together the five are cast
into the sea. The capital greets her
with wheat sheaves and ginger in its mail slots.
In the capital it is required of each pilgrim

who walks near her to fling pine pitch
over their shoulders and onto the faces
of the penitents stumbling close behind.
A procession in her honor is held in this way.

As pitch leaks under their hair-shirts, stinging their
raw backs, each filthy penitent mouths an oath
of thanks to her. She is hoisted up to a balcony
suspended above the boulevard

by a wrought iron chain run through
the nose of a bronze buffalo. Shirtless
flagellants scourge themselves in protest of this.
The crowd stops suddenly. The pilgrims

mount upon the penitents’ shoulders.
She watches as a young boy is passed
from the back of the procession over
the heads of the penitents. The crowd is

quiet while the boy is passed closer.
She sees that his ears have been burned, and that his
head has been shaved. The boy is passed closer.
She sees that he is naked and

his teeth have been filed. The boy is passed
closer still. She sees that his genitals have
been painted gray. The crowd is quiet
and the boy is lifted up to the balcony.

The boy stands in front of her, smiling.
With the back of his hand he wipes his nose.
She looks past the boy to the crowd which
looks past the boy up to her. The boy pulls

his right leg from its joint with a pop
and offers it up to her. She smiles.
The boy smiles again. She takes the leg
from the boy with her mouth by the ball end.

The boy wipes his nose again. He pulls
his leg from her mouth and returns it with a pop
to his hip. Unto man in the capital
is appoined uncertainty. Around each neck

in the capital are strung pebbles that
remind her of the wooden testicles
of the horse that carried St. James
over the wooden and rolling heads

of the Moors. Punishment is found with
the company it kept. The flaggelants protest this.

A WATCHED POT NEVER BOILS

Revolution makes time move
faster than any measure of skill.
We will prove

this with truth
tied as bundles of unmarked bills.
Revolt makes time move

arms full of
leather satchels full
of proof

and however we’ve
begun to feel,
this revolt has made time move

past ourselves
into barrels of jet fuel
soon lit to prove

that regret, and our relationship
to the revolution make time move.
I am near you. I am well.
This is proof enough.

THIS IS THEFT

They spoke slowly and deliberately,
as though they were lighting a fire.

There was this hoochie-cooch show.
When the feller wasn’t looking,
we snuck in under the tent.
There was this gal up on stage,
doing a har-em dance.
First thing I know,
she’d dropped her dress
and she was naked.

All over?

From head to toe.

What’d she look like?

She had a belly button so big
you could’ve stuck your whole
middle finger in it.

SPRINGTIME IN THE GULAGS

Last night the prisoners’ dreams were filled
with the dead fathers of former close friends.
Each woke sweating and stuck to their leaking
air mattresses, thanking God they were not in Ohio.
Over breakfast and the deafening whoosh
of six month’s snow melting, the prisoners
discuss with full mouths: he was in tears,
I was not sure what it was I was to do.

The conversation soon turns to plans,
the prisoners pledge to memorize accounts
of eachother’s prison stay using pneumonic
devices, approximate melodies for singing
the accompaniment to each other’s account.
Other things were done as well. Some took

to swallowing fish hooks wrapped with
old bits of boot tongues, each line tied to the knob
of the barrack’s door. After the others barked replies
to the overseer’s role call, the swallowers patiently hope
for the sentry to wrench the door open,
for their stomachs to turn inside out ,
and for a comfortable April spent in the infirmary,
sipping gruel and fluffing their moldy pillows
while almost humming to themselves: he was in tears,
we were not sure what it was we were to do.

Each prisoner now waits with patience
for the finish of their internment, after which,
as was pledged, each prisoner will begin to search
for the person who can sketch their songs
as drawings with actors cast as prisoners,
and prisoners cast as narrators emotively whistling
of springtime pounding the barrack’s doors
with fists gloved in black leather shining
bright under Siberia’s equinorial sun.

THIS IS OCCUPATION

This is occupation. This is an air-raid.
This is starting over. This is the end of
all things planned for. He has two hundred hours
free for the killing

now that she has taken the shovel. He has
taken to resting under hills. His arms ache
after waking curled in the same heep he curled
asleep in last night.

These are left on a dirty quilt, sold
five bucks each at flea markets in a lead
town surrounded by towers, spot lights, guard shacks,
highways empty of

snow banks, blockades. In spite of whatever
treaties signed, whatever toasts toasted since then,
this is occupation. Dozens of sirens
humming with she’s gone.

I AM NO ODDSMAN

Do you know who took that photo? I did. I took it and
I love it. Don’t you? Do you know who dug this canal?

I did. I dug it and I love it. Do you know who pointed
that light into the sun, who walked across the ice,

who cleaned the lake, who ate the metal shards, who’s been here and there?
I did all of this and I love all of it. I did all of this and

I planted a garden. I planted a garden of windshields.
That makes no sense. I bought a garden of windshields in which

I planted a pond of singing catfish. I relax in the magnified light
of the curved panes, and I listen to the catfish swallow rats.

They are not really catfish, they are diamonds. Diamonds from Equatorial
Guinea. Diamonds with which I clothe an insurgency,

with which I trim my glassy garden. The pond water
is amonia and my shit has turned black.

I offer you the fruits of my garden in good will. I offer them to you
on a truck bed. I offer them to you on a seven year old.

I offer them to you on a waiting list. I hope you enjoy them each.
My garden is growing. Imagine that. I have windshields

over two thousand feet tall. I have other windshields over three
thousand feet tall. I myself am more than five thousand feet tall.

As I look over my rows of windshields, and my amonia pond full
of hungry, singing diamonds, all feeding on rats, I can see the flea

market and I can hear You bartering with the Salesman over how much longer
You can have It and how You are going to pay Him for having It that long.

The Salesman looks like You and Me, One could say that We are in His image.
One could also say that He is in Our image. Another could say that This all sounds

like soft science, that there is not the incessant clicking
of the harder sciences. Really they are not rats, they are cooked hams,

each marbled with a peculiar pattern of fat such that
there is a ham for each apostle’s likeness.

Floating in quorum, the hams confer in the clear amonia
amidst thousand foot tall windshields and gardener,

each ham pink with a different expression as befitting their ministries:
Peter holding a chisel that is pointed at You, James tossing the pelota,

Paul making detailed notes upon a sheepskin as to when yesterday was,
and what time It is after all of This. The disciples take a vote

as to what It was the Salesman meant when He said there were two Others,
a Manager and a Prostitute, inside of Him but outside of Him.
The results are as follows:

Up from the bottom of the planted pond,
through the apostle hams and singing catfish,
into the downpour.

SEVEN JUNIPERS EXPLODE

Double-helixed trunks are left
with cauterized branches stripped
of bark, peddling thin shade
to the graveled wash.

This spring’s

snow melt will stir the cinders,
blackened flows so quick to slip
off the red bluff, down into
the river.

The glaring east

bank soon becomes clouded and
unfishable for two miles.
Gray Jerusalem crickets
swarm the scorched trees and are
often blown from their sooty
perches down to the water
by the wind gusting upstream.

THE BOATMAN THAT IS A HORSE

It is the other day, and a boatman walks home with me.
He clears his throat, then pulls both shoulderblades from my back.

I collapse forward at the chest and stop walking. The boatman stops walking as well.
From his satchel he removes bits of wicker and a bundle of bandages.

He chews the wicker like you would an old tire that has been used as a sandal,
and he rips the bandages into coins. He tells me to wait there,

that he will return soon and then we will continue. I wonder what it is he wants
with my shoulderblades. The boatman returns as a horse without hooves,

in place of his hooves are newspapers. He speaks only Spanish,
understanding him is difficult because although now a horse,

the boatman’s mouth still chews the wicker. Have you ever tried to understand
a boatman that is a horse who speaks only Spanish and whose mouth is full of wicker?

I become confused as to what it is he wants with my shoulder blades.
I grow tired, my knees buckle, I am sitting on clay.

The boatman that is a horse joins me, and the clay stains orange both my clothes
and his hide. The boatman now nurses his hooves. Or his newspapers.

He snorts and rubs the messy stumps behind his ears, all the while flapping his gums.
From what I could understand, he was going on about the drought.

I become even more tired. I nudge with my chin my shoulderblades between the boatman
that is a horse without hooves and myself, and I spit into my hollow bones.

With my cheek and the boatman’s horse cheek to the clay, we sip the spittle.
The boatman that is a horse toasts my health and the excellent price he paid
for his makeshift hooves.

THIS IS SANITATION

For luck I swab the puss from my
good eye with a rotten pig hoof.
For the foul steam swelling over
the flaccid folds of neck skin drooping

down the putrid crowd’s back,
leaves are now sodden. Each
reveler is bare to the waist.
All dance and slobber around
the trash fire lit near
the half-finished cathedral.
The plaza’s dust balls with spittle.

Revelers are burning their shirts.
The fire sparks green with the dead
skin and salt-packed fabric of
this spring’s planting. Some dance
balancing sticky-fingered children
on their damp shoulders. Others
further back rub burnt pig snouts
on their children’s faces for luck.

Even beggars have come
to lay bare for the crowd
their sweating potbellies.

OLD MAN WINTER IS TREES

Here are bristlecone pines
gnarled to an ancient
shoreline ridge.
I am asleep at the bottom
of an icey trash compactor.

The trees stifly swap
stories of past ice-ages.
I’ve calmed down, but
I’m still shaking.
A trio of singing
serpenting belts
warble the first lines
of my last will:

Please bury my body
someplace warm.
Use my hollowed head
to haul heating oil
for those without hands.
With what money I
haven’t spent yet,
buy a head stone,
paint it to look like
a large lump of coal and
put it somewhere
someone can see it.

THIS DEER IS SICK AS SHIT

Please look over here where
there is a deer who’s tongue has swollen up,
and who’s head has swollen up to twice its size.
Watch it crash through the greasewood brush.
Watch it bark and cough at the swarms of gnats
and mosquitos as thick as sawdust off a millsaw.
Its neck is crooked, see how it is bent as though
a log was dropped just ahead of its shoulders?
See how on its hips the hair is matted and coming out,
how the deer molts even though spring was months ago?
Watch it go end over end off the bank into the creek.
Watch it go end over end through the water to the gravel
bar on the opposite shore. It is cruel to watch it.
The deer moves to water because of its fever.
It moves to the water for its fever.

There is another near here, not far,
only through the willow flats and across the rocks.
On April 9, 2005 I found a calf moose hamstrung
by one while others kept it distracted. Frozen solid.
When this cold, ice freezes in from the sides.
When I axe its hind quarter, the calf splinters like wood.
If left alone there is no hole soon, only more ice.

Here it is, the second of three, a doe.
See how she does not move? See how her big blue tongue keeps
her mouth open? See how she shivers her hide to keep off the bugs?
If I were her I would have chosen a windy ridge to die upon,
rather than down here with these swarms that cannot be beat,
or even scared off. See how her hooves have begun to melt?
That is because of the fever as well.

The lake has turned to tin.
Two acres of water have been cleared,
but still there is no roof.
Funny thing is the whole place
smells as though we just got here
or as though we just left.

The third of three is hung in a tree.
I hung it there by a nail.

STRANGE ASS CRAZY FUCKING CONNECTIVE KIND OF SHIT

You and I have paid the experts to cut us to pieces, then pull those pieces out our ears.
You and I between us have enough to piece together another one.

I have no idea who you are, what you want, or what you know and yet
here we are perched upon the pilings of an old port-town, watching the island

sputter and glow above us, listening to the fisherman mend their nets and leaky boats.
Because I don’t know how things were before, my liver is adapting slowly

to the idea of being without my insides. Under eucalyptus, underwater, under mud.
At the top of the canyon, soaked. I think you understand what I mean.

Randall is in a motorized bed and the hills have become boulders to dynamite
and remove. What it comes down to is neither of us need our insides anymore.

CAN’T YOU TWIST THAT SMALLER

Someone dropped a two ton osciliscope
on me this morning. It was as heavy as hell.
I loaned it to a man that was sorting through
the city’s phone banks, he was busy connecting
various parking ticket complaints. He put a bundle
of wires in his mouth to shake my hand for giving him
the osciliscope. Through the wires he mentioned
that thousands were dead, and that the osciliscope
would be quite handy in this.

EVERYTHING I EVER LEARNED ABOUT REBELLION

This is a business, this is all a business.
Your hands must be kept from your body because
in spite of your jewels and your precious
trinkets, they will come for you wearing braces.

Hear them pedaling their doomed tricycle,
singing at the tops of their smoking lungs
songs we once sang sweetly to each other while
the dogs in the woodpile nuzzled our dung?

Back then we needed something to do. Laugh boy,
we split into two and called it feeling at home.
But we were at home. It is a birthday pony.
It is a strange kind of rest. It is at home not feeling at home.

THE SHOE CHURCH OF MISGUIDANCE

Today I packed for New Hampshire to meet
the teacher who can teach me to be quiet.
I plan to walk there. I will climb
the Rocky Mountains and I will swim
the Mississippi River. With bundles
of clean socks sealed in pill bottles
strapped to a sled that is tied to my waist,
I am half way through the smiling mid-west.
Word reaches me from the school of the teacher:
Heatwave. New Hampshire is on fire.
Housing is now scarce for students.
I spend that day shopping for tents
to pitch six weeks later upon
my arrival on his front lawn.
Tired in his yard, I see his family
frowning as I piss on the old birch tree
that shades well the teacher’s burning street.
Two hours pass of wild-fire born heat:
I break into the teacher’s house,
and make off with a pair of his shoes.
I read somewhere that a person’s face
can be seen smiling up from the tongues
of his shoes, so I build a grand church
to the shoes of the teacher in which
worshippers will come to hum in praise
of his poetic skill and leathery shoe face.
I can see myself now, cutting a check to
pay the tution charged by the teacher’s school
with proceeds from the admission fees I charge
the teacher’s worshippers at my shoe-church.

INITIATIVE, RESPONSIBLITY, DISCIPLINE, AND OTHER CUMBERSOME THINGS

Bless this radiator that it may sing always,
bless this dog that it may howl always. Someone
please slide past in a whale-bone sled and bless
these people for their filed-down skeletons.
Bless them for their cold sores and their gray hairs.
Someone please bless these ears that they might not explode.
Someone please catch up their ankle in the leathers
of a galloping pig and bless these hills for their cattle
and pea gravel. Bless them for their tailings, their alluvial fans,
their scrub oak and limekilns as the pig drags you past.
Hung alongside sacks of rice under a helicopter, please swing over
these hands and bless them for their tingling fingertips.
I would do all of this myself, but anymore
the only time I leave the house
is to go out and buy something.

Bless this day for tomorrow, bless tomorrow for me,
and bless the next day that the plates might shift
to warm the springs hot. Bless yesterday that it
may be remembered, and please bless the fish that
they may be kept free from lice. Someone please be swallowed
by an owl, and as the owl flies silently over me asleep
in a ditch, bless these teeth that they might not fall out
all at once in a dream. In the ditch bile leaks out from me
green and blue and onto the grass of the ditch banks.
It seems as though spring may be soon coming.
Please bless these feet that they may walk away.
Like I said, I would do all of this myself,
but it seems no one is filling out the necessary paperwork.
More and more people everyday are giving up
on paperwork and turning to subsistance farming
for support. We all have planter boxes sprouting
sweet potatoes and almond trees, so we all should be fine.

LET US BE REALISTIC, THERE IS NO WAY THAT I CAN EVER PAY FOR THIS

I am still unable to listen
to anything spoken by my fat woman on the bus

who wears faded and stinking sweat pants
who is from Miles City Montana
whose face looks like an old orange
complaining from the bottom of a hairy trash bag
who has children by a man

who has never paid child support
who works maintenance at the second of two
hospitals, two hospitals that with three casinos,
a walmart, a hotel, and a restaurant are the only

places to work in Miles City Montana.
She knows this because she has a friend
that keeps her updated by ‘telephone.’
The bus driver has lips in his nose and swats

at asian passengers when they come too close,
but he tells her he knows which courthouse
of the two courthouses she should go
to. He has a friend also.

She says she wants a divorce. She says
he says he does not
for they are being watched.
The bus driver swings at a chinese man in corduroys

and later the fat woman in stinking sweat pants
who today is wearing makeup
who wonders about the bus driver
who this morning has brushed back her hairy trash bag
from her old orange face and complaining mouth

who stomps off the bus. I stomp off the bus behind
her thinking Miles City Montana must have
more places to work than two hospitals, three
casinos, a walmart, a hotel, and a restaurant.

POINT THE FINGER

I hired a potted plant to balance above the door jam
quietly while I accuse it of my irresposibilities.
I named the plant after my older brother.
I named the plant Jeff Edward.
In front of the apartment where I live
my creditors sing me the old songs my parents once knew
about beards of bees and bears playing drums.
When my creditors come to sing I bring the plant
in a polished brass pram out onto the porch.
I smack my lips and smile and whistle
and slap my chest and tell Jeff Edward
that we should both be grateful to live
in a town so full of singing creditors.

If it is cold when the creditors come,
I raise the pram’s venetian shade over Jeff Edward to coo
like a fat, one-legged, french pigeon with only half my feathers
and a large, puss-filled boil under my earhole.

If it is warm when the creditors come,
I peel off my clothes and stiff scabs
and I lick my bruised belly button
in front of Jeff Edward.

YOU CAN ALL EAT MY ASS

So it begins.