a knot of pampas grass.

The chairs watching shadows on the glass top

like white poodles, all named Handsome,

from different phases of your life,

watching television pictures of your sex dreams play out.

Sob, elf.

Yelp, gnome, of the end.

Stalking My Ex-Girlfriend in a Pasture

STALKING MY EX-GIRLFRIEND IN A PASTURE

In the beginning, the Worldly Winds

portioned us hides of equal thickness.

But then one day my ex’s glossy vagina spoke.

The breath came from inside—

a womb-rung bell of molten gold

unfed by the Winds:

You are a cart that I can teach to be two bicycles.

I wetted my hands in her

and her eyebrows and smile made a circuit in her face;

she described an orgasm

so imaginatively that I longed to become her.

She instructed me to unyoke the mind and body

so that the mind could speak

as the body came

but I split wrong. Only my mind split—

into an array of sirens with

show tunes played in between them.

Or maybe it was only my body

and that is why I am naked and bloody.

I want to dress to the nines—

to wear a navy tuxedo

with a white chrysanthemum in the lapel.

Then I can approach her,

submit her body to the operations

of the gods, expose her

bell to the Winds,

and take back the hide she took

to be the sheet

on my eternal sickbed.

*

I refuse the doctor’s fizzy tincture

because each bubble is me

until it pops on my tongue

and then it’s you.

Mommy Harangues Poor Randal

MOMMY HARANGUES POOR RANDAL

Money is self-comprehending,

take a hard look in the mirror,

your brow is brutal, your teeth are for meat,

your eyes are globes and hunched beneath them

is my ghost who blinks them shut, who pulls out

your tears, I’m finished. We’re finished.

Go outside and play, but if you come

knocking on my door when you’re done

don’t be surprised if I say Who’s there?

And if you keep pushing, and dare

name yourself, here’s a warning—

they call it a punch line because I punch you

in the fucking face if you step over the line.

Lyric Complicity for One

LYRIC COMPLICITY FOR ONE

I wanted to speak with a woman

so passionately and imaginatively that our personalities

would dissolve, we would begin to lie,

and a thing between us

much more beautiful than either of our voices

would begin to speak—a lyric complicity.

Instead, imagine a fisherman

rubbing hot water on his throat.

His mother once said

gargle hot water when your throat’s tight.

He can’t remember the word gargle in the memory,

only his mother fanning out her fingers as she said it,

small, precise, and a little wicked.

So now he gets it wrong, remembering the fingers, feeling forlorn.

Beneath him swim bluefin tuna at fifty miles an hour,