Doom like room
utters and alters
change, like range.
*
There
is my clock,
mark it
on the map.
*
Very fast for two voices,
confusing together-
split duet.
*
A door's melody
is in its keyhole.
“You should see an itsy
wooden
door. Do you? Okay.
The door
opens
into
a gymnasium. Go in. There is a door
out
of
the gym, on the left-hand-side wall.
On
the left.
Good. It's a magnetic-bolted door.
Open
it-
the combination is 5-5-6-4-9-4.
Hurry!
I'm
in here!”
network of slippery nerves on and in an
all-American girl, who is pushing and
cursing the two-faced crowd around her fractured car.
I touched the squirming needlework which we
photoed, wrote up, drooled over, and drew.
The engagement-
“Show me your ring.
Yikes! Can we call this a rock?
Get a bank box.
Who's paying?
Lock it in your bottom drawer.
Or mine.
Is-is it fake or mined?”
The wedding-
vacuuming sewing machines free
of fluff,
sharpening needles. Soon we'll
be filming in slo-mo
me at my most unsportsmanlike:
I'll toss
this soon-sewn queen-sized quilt
of so soft fox from behind round
the nude bride.
When I do you'll see the guests
exhale, and a few stir.
And then
achy nooky fellow fie falling-
killing her her son burst
from her lips, hacking he brought
up spittle, throat clear he
brayed,
you have spoiled your death
with me-
Icky Nicky falafel foray.
*
My ex,
Mary? Her skull was an urn.
She was fixated on Phoenix,
AZ-a
real phoenix of an idée
fixe.
She scrambled eggs without milk.
But I don't want to walk and
talk about Mary,
I just want to see our son.
to cross the stream occurred to it…
its meandering found focus during the crossing…
after the stream more wheat-tangled fields
jigsawn by streams stretched on the other side.
The thing with a quality ran miles
crossing fields and streams. It came to a city
where two small things ran in a sunny alley
between the two buildings that concern
us here: the thing hoped to catch
the two things before their coming
friend, a third thing, arrived, as it
would, seconds before the thing caught
the two things. The thing caught three things.
It asked them to hum tones
before all four ran into the sunny alley.
All things began to hum and then run.
The three ran on their way out of the alley,
The thing entered a door in the alley after
considering, as it ran, letting, or not,
the little things go. It let them go and entered
a building through its alley door. What was
in the building? The thing. And others,
less active. But growing. Sensitive vegetable things
in an indoor forest. Bewildered, pleased, the thing
enjoyed the pleasure of an indoor forest.
It sprinted, weaving and dexterous, among
the things, planning to meet the stream it met
as it halted suddenly because of this stream.
Now the stream boiled with salmon,
now the vegetable things grew in straight rows
planted by humans, now they
clumped in radiating colonies,
now the stream seemed as much debating with
as flowing forth in its chosen direction.
Then it absolutely flowed in its desired direction.
The thing waded in, adjusting, paddling,
warning itself about the waterfall it
would begin to suspect was ahead as it lurched
along with the current. The stream became
the waterfall, through a hole
in a wall that, granite and solid, marked a
boundary of the forest. Through and over
went the thing, falling inside falling water,
now it knew, now it thought how
its accurate prophecy was spoken too late.
An effortless forward with a likely death
at its end-better than great labor
for a likely death as end-down, down
the thing went forward toward the bottom,
cloaked in a stream of water…