Brawling, cursing, 3 o’clock in the morning
drunk.
Plural angers
blush your face.
You point at strangers with mouth open,
tongue bouncing on its
toes.
Burn your identification card,
take a shoe in your teeth,
blur it,
and wrestle 6 women, 5 men
all at once,
flip each
out the ring—
then
wire-haired, razor-tusked
wild pigs chase
through forests
to eat you,
and your horse,
but
you wake with face wet
the day after you kissed
your only child and his wife
who flew across the world
to live 2 years,
now 8.

Yank the drain plug,
you swirl down,
gases do hurricane black,
and you think fondly—
sinkful glared jouncing—
of that fragment of earwax motorboating,
feel sorry for that diminutive
with heart bigger than yours
in water’s poignancy.
Or cast the hook and line—trout rivets,
some disaster in a metal
point where molecules
buzz atoms
not ready to break, not instantly
expand and elevate some halo effect,
which
makes you think
go it alone
or go it like this:
weeds, skyscrapers, machines evaporate
over your shoulder
as you rush in bleached daylight
to embrace Deborah
who has you
vapor and sight.

Beat a horse, stamps you.
Kick a dog, bites you.
Physics—push-pull,
whack-smack,
I always say,
so forget
rabbity joy
of prairie mornings
with zip of grass skeeters
and hop of bush nubbers.
Also, huge fragrance.
Forget as well
kind hearts
and great minds anywhere—
pushed, they’ll trade
your prosthetic leg for a
cut of meat.

Want to be strategic
not an idiot,
which
doesn’t stop my
subconscious from crazylegging
or my joint tissues inching nearer the precipice
of nervous breakdown
while Mom ages lighter, wafery—
tilting back, stumbling forward
smack on hard floors or
concrete sidewalks—could we
keep her on her feet!
Clean wrist break
of her left radial bone and my toes do sweat—
I’m ready for
some Portuguese red wine,
but nit, nit, nit, I’m a dog at a
thorn in a paw with
front teeth.
My feet, these bare feet,
do pad up behind
deaf five-year-old
nephew Milo sitting on
nice grass,
under blue sky,
as his face turns around smiling.