With her face in her plate. I have been thinking about the horrified

Expression of her little boy as a waiter approached the booth.

Near me a lady in a business suit sighed, “For that kind

Of woman, abortion should be free.” Think about the theory

That crime rates have declined since Roe versus Wade versus

The theory that sexually transmitted diseases have increased.

Think about identity versus ideology versus idiocy, the Center

For Bio-Ethical Reform versus the sinners of the bio-unethically

Formed. The Center for Life and Hope versus the Center for Death

And Despair. Because thinking is feeling, I think about death

All the time: the food under my nails, the nails underfoot,

The skullish sockets packed with dirt. Maybe the soul is tethered

To the body like an embryo even when the body is no longer alive.

Maybe zombies have taken over. Are you for the Humans for Life,

The Families for Life, the Armed Forces for Life, or are you for

Something else? Because thinking is feeling, there are thousands

Of compartments and pigeonholes in my brain, there are polemics

And porn flicks and utopian blueprints, court briefs, sketches,

Graphs, philosophical theories like “Cruelty is a form of laziness,”

But there is only one version of death. It takes work to imagine

The ineffable, which I think is the word for something that can’t be

Effed up. I think the sanctimonious are worse than people who hate

Music, would you agree with that? At this very moment, they are fighting

about the order of things we should value: God, Family, Country—

No: Love, Justice, Money. I can no longer grasp the logic

Of conflicts. In the pro-life versus pro-choice debate, for instance,

It’s the versus that’s of interest to me. Remember Fred Williamson

Saying to the friend who became his enemy at the end of Bucktown,

“I don’t want to kill you, I just want to beat the hell out of you”?

I love the lovely restraint in that. Cruelty is pretty damn lazy, actually.

It takes more effort to earn someone’s love than it does to punch

Someone in the face. May you be punched in the face, may you weep

Until your nose is fat and crumpled as the hood of a child’s raincoat,

That’s my curse for the self-righteous. That’s the “Thug Life for Life”

In me, a former self versus a self who wants to change, Cassius Clay

Versus Muhammad Ali, who said, “A man who views the world

The same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.”

The trouble with thinking thinking is feeling is sometimes

There is no feeling. Twenty years ago I would not have believed

My unborn child would still be here pushing a cry out of me.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR A SÉANCE WITH VLADIMIRS

after Vladimir Mayakovsky

Feeble Heart, Beware: do not contact the spirits ill prepared.

TWO REASONS SÉANCES WORK

1. The dead are lonely. Symptoms include a faint witchcraft, a boom-bap, some claptrap played in a parallel room. I’m thinking of “Self Destruction” performed by the Stop the Violence Movement all-stars. “I am too tough to die.” This is the motto of the dead when they are alive.