I hate these days, the wrinkled endpapers of summer. I hate everyone
— I hate you too: but no — in fact, I love us all: but love is so very
costly. It makes my liver burst; and my pancreas also has swollen.
I can’t really keep this up.

 

So I’ve learned to hide my days away behind the grocery story,
swigging globs of beer from empties and returning them for deposit.
When it gets a little hot like this, life gets harder. So many bugs
swarm inside the mind. I can’t really say when this will stop.

 

I called you this year, but it didn’t really help, did it? Now I scratch
in contemplation. Hey! Look at what comes out! What else is left?
Of what use are my hands?
                                                      These are ancient mysteries.

 

The work of hands fills the streaming days that chase the end of
summer. I fumble with words, stutter poems muttered under coffee-
stained breath, mumbling bits of image blurring out like figures
weaving in the wind, bobbing underneath

 

the cloud-dappled daylight stirring autumn within us. When autumn
turns over inside of us, then what comes next? The winter of our
beating hearts? That’s a cold notion indeed, and cold a long time.

 

                                 Shall we sit and wait for spring to warm us?

 

Then we’ll be waiting a long time, with little to show save for a long
line of empties and impatient expectation.

Having met you and spent you and then fucked you some more,
I find I have surprisingly little to say. 

 

There is some more peanut butter in the spoon. 
More of us have fleas than ever before.

 

No one has reported a punch-line missing, and no one seems to notice.
Only relieved at the echo of a screen door slamming.

 

Only one force has irrevocably moved the world
yet still managed to retain its normal human strength.

 

One is a lion and one is a kitty and
I am often struck by the sameness and the difference.

 

What we have here is a dramatic failure to complete
the soteriological alchemy that changes lead into loving the savior.

 

I am trying to keep my patience as I wait
among an unofficial pattern of calla-lilies spreading open.

 

There is no there there, there is only here.
Nobody wants that, don’t they?

 

A very tiny vestibule has been polished and waits
for a working theory of uselessness to come and prove its value.

 

One is a puma and one is a bobcat and one
has never before been witnessed by mankind.

 

The only numbers that count are the prime numbers,
all others pick up the white courtesy phone to speak with Dogtown.

 

Having been there and done that I know that
there is only a here there, there is already gone. 

 

We are the people who have been forced from our beds
by the flooding banks of memory swells raging and growing. 

 

There is no better way to stop the influx
than to close the embittered, abandoned screen

 

completely.  Rising and falling like leaves on the breeze,
swallowed within the wake of many tiny false eyelashes,

 

the engorged memory matters only when you
sit on the dump, listening to distant, preternatural screams. 

 

Everyone must go to sleep, and wake up in the morning
among the patterned mass convergence of unspeakable bottles.

 

They bob in the mass of the eternal floodwaters.
Their attitude seems both distant and precise. 

 

One is a bird and one is a plane and one
is an entirely unfamiliar beast expecting to be catalogued. 

 

It has a pair of coppery, keen claws that it stretches up
to gouge its own fucked-up eyes from their sockets. 

Just get back now, and just stretch for the typewriter,
‘cuz nothing else will change the trap you’ve tapped into.
Even Ruidoso’s Hot Springs cannot wash away the pain that

 

like the beerbong, sucks into your brain the sweet
swish of cologne traces and the hair and the sweat.
This is the nightmare wonder of the real live world

 

that is a rat trap, and has already trapped.
Despite the jasmine jazz that just kept flowing,
hiding, showing everything all right up until

 

until it was wrong. And I don’t know whatwentwrong
until it went oh so wrong, and now we’re spread under
until it is sempiternally over.
                      (Mother, what does

 

sempiternal mean?)
                It means that these lips will
stay cinnamon sweet, lying despite vomit bile that
jumps Pierian and projectile style from this throat.

 

It means that you just keep fucking. Ignore the sorenesses
and the desperate “no, please” that only shuts him up.
Just keep bleeding, yes, just keep eating, as Mother told

 

you to do so, so many years ago. No baths will save
you, and no piano will wash this shit from your insides.
All you can do is just keep singing, just keep bringing

 

this vile bile home. Forget everything now, and wake
into another new day. So passing strange; like another
day, it’s all the same day. Very passing strange.