still here and portioned out to us now.

~

Someone’s put potted orchids in the mammography waiting room.

For hope maybe, for promise of bloom, a violet refusal to refuse—

and hung a mirror in the cubicle, the better to admire by

while changing into the pepto-gown.

Look! my mammary glands awaiting their mammogram,

plush with milk last year, now stilled

in advance of the smashing slab.

A mammogram gives the coldest ultimatum:

soft targets in your skin-socks prepare for a flattening,

and prolonging everything my lungs, this persistent heart,

as the day’s pain spatulas in on the twitter feed

Aleppo Jerusalem London Kabul

violence accumulating in windows on a screen.

~

Mama was a target in her transplant bed

where she I found myself praying

as the chemicals daisied in, pinpricks, a salvation

the door to the hall was not for her
walking was not for her
then breathing was not

being lifted aloft that was

and a stretcher and a still still bed

a faraway face was she by then

with no further questions

with a difficulty turning on the light

did she fall soft that last night
(and now?)

afar afar she went my soft star

the silence will be sudden then last

the silence will be sudden then last

~

We rocked it for a while in New York

it seemed like quite the era

and had the martinis to prove it

many magnificents

but the footlights were shining too brightly now

was our time past?

We’re not in our coffinclothes, not yet

Don’t mope, Mother would say

(but I’m so very good at it!)

On the other hand

I’m feeling kinda good today in my ginny way

and bought myself some cocktails

and thought of the planet wheel

and how one might

hop off

~

I’ll antioxidize as best I can

bat away death with berries and flax

but there’s no surviving

this slick merciless world

a bucket of guts we’ll be

full-blown dead

though why wax gloomy

we’re not real

just a pudding of flesh

trying gamely to preserve ourselves

my ducky grandee, glowing friend

let’s sing a bit this may end

in love may end in blood

but it will (badly) end

~

Sybaritic afterlife I don’t crave you.
I like daylight, I like crowds,
I don’t think it will be charming underground.
The silence will be sudden then last—

what’s chic will shrink,
there won’t be any pretty, pity,
will never peaches there, or air,
we’ll be so squashed and sour there.

I don’t want a cold place,

don’t want a threadbare

clamp and consequence all old.

Our loneliness will be prolonged then go too far.

Oh fuck it’s true,
then nothing left of you.

~

Has it turned out we’ve wasted our time?
We’ve wasted our time.

Our magnificent bodies on the dissecting table,
our day after tomorrow,
our what to do now.