open as an officer of the state scraped the body free.

11. SPIKE PREMONITION

I don’t want to go on no more adventures with Spike, the leader of the Spikes, because my good sense tells me he is someone Death wants to educate. Cool as marbles of sweat and covered in “wows” when he walks pretty much anywhere in town. The song he sings he says is a tribute to women. Its translation is “Baby Got Back.” Sike ain’t one of his words but shut-up is. He says shut up when somebody sneeze and everybody obey. The windows shutter, the widows shutter, the winos hallucinate. He appears sometime at my door like a mythical creature with surprise sprouting from his face.

12. IDEOGRAMS AND/OR IDIOMS

The Spikes \Incisor/

Of twanging that talk that sounds like money, that ricochet encasement that’s twelve degrees wide. Oooed & Eeeeked with possibility. & that able-joyed.

The SixFours ))Helix((

Lil Elf. Cornucopian. Damn near ascetic dust net. Pliant curl-a-plenty. Boomerung & Blung. The rustle in the sprawling that is noise listened to carefully, but the kind of noise that is nothing.

The Billies <Apex>

Nicknamed because of them staunched cellar doors. A flared signage. A walk-in exhibit of the cavernous. An accoutrement of cartilage & every empty vial worth scenting.

The Quixotes >Orbitals<

Eye candor but without weeping & weeing, I. Looking like weaponry, I. Looking on a body who fine it seem infinitely, I. So impossibly engorgeous she seem to be a glittering, I.

The Antlers =Fontanel=

On all the Falstaff boys. Implicit pullover. Of a shine. A lucid basket case. Of brushable or blasted follicles. Or a nude wood & knowledge no one on the other side of the hill will possess.

13. TRIBE PARTY

A school of boys around a girl, for example.

They make verbs of bauble, whatever that means.

Bubbles of oohs ooze and the mouths

of each second do their guppy tick, that gulping shit

to live. “I want to go down in history,”

I’ve heard ordinary people say that. I’ve heard names

become catchphrases, I’ve seen names needled deep

into the skin, an ink pumping like oil leagues

beneath the surface of day. Could be we’ll say “our”

with our last breaths: the girls who become unfortunate;

the boys with their tongues hard on the air, starving to dance

with no idea what happened or why it happened to them.

BLACK CONFEDERATE GHOST STORY

Attention, African-American apparitions hung,

burned, or drowned before anyone alive was born:

please make a mortifying midnight appearance

before the handyman standing on my porch

this morning with a beard as wild as Walt Whitman’s.

Except he is the anti-Whitman, this white man

with Confederate pins littering his denim cap and jacket.

(And by mortify, dear ghosts, I mean scare the snot out of him.)

I wish I were as tolerant as Walt Whitman

waltzing across the battlefield like a song

covering a cry of distress, but I want to be a storm