1
First thing I’ll do is give you back
some time I’d have otherwise stolen.
The firework’s residential thwack
in the eardrum has made a sullen
person of me. About it let’s be quick,
as a shepherd of gross verse
is quick with a thesaurus. For all the sick
ears among us, this refunded time is yours.
Yours to romantically pursue,
making like the gift is ongoing,
though I’m within rights to fire my milieu,
wrench a pox where wax is growing.
But remain firm, like a leftover ham.
Good work, team! Especially you, ma’am.

2
Glad that’s over! A square can be
a little longer now. Be rectangular
at least a bit. Just obey law number three
about ratios. I’m poised with particular
aptitude to be stoked on this.
Squares were sides all enforced equal
my whole child-hood in New Glarus.
No reach to ‘em and no peril
to forge ‘em useful. We the people won
what our shapes had been years staring
at: wiggling room for either one
or both of length and width, lines sharing
right to extend the little that’s needed
to shovel up dirt, or feel secreted.

3
“He wants you to look with him.” Milk,
and sugar, first. Distant wet sands, and dirty.
A poem in a book about bolts of silk,
ill-gotten. Dentists, however flirty
or uncomfortable. Stapler used by boy.
Boy’s fits, envisioned in a nightmare.
Italian men react to expensive toy
number ten: a massive carriage with no spare
tire. All of us trying our damnedest
to remember any of these glaring shards
at the funeral. Stock-still-standing contest.
Steve albini, pictured holding the cards,
praying. To see all this and painfully hear
lies about tags on our minivan’s rear.

4
‘Tis Majesty indeed to rule alone,
over no one. Intransitive.
Use it for its own sake, you old crone!
Better and half than any old laxative.
Let’s say you’d like to mold an “upper crust.”
You need to hire how many buffoons?
Your own bad thread may be discussed
by air trapped fast in balloons.
So here is my ruler. Here is my wrist
too, in case it inspires.
But your broad breast will be the mist.
The fog hangs over the empty spires.
And the yip from my box of experiments
joins the repast of royal sentiments.

5
But I do know one and one.
One’s a mite, a microscopic terrorist.
The other is the spun tone
of the piano of Bill Evans, pianist.
My idol! A Chickering grand,
he had. May he remain a myth.
Two songs for the swollen hand
and no one to go to bed with.
It has a voice, like a transposed number.
Without precedent, we adopt
the tuning. It is a liquid lumber
For a hot hut. It is untapped.
To quit a job, you must give notice
that you must play the piano’s head of sawdust.

6
I’m sad that you are leaving.
Authors doing with running from simplicity.
I’m angry (with you!) that you’re leaving.
A look of sadness and perplexity
is my point of view. You’re the topic
I’ll force into every head now.
No, mercy in writing is not big,
but it hates those who head south.
Though I can change things in the writing.
Fly envious, and meet with poise.
Migratory discs in the sea-wind biting,
miscounted, complementary noise.
I’ll go out and find someone new tomorrow,
gesture welcome, crown the narrow hero.

7
What’s the expression? The goalposts are moving?
We make a major “use case”
into a big ordeal, beyond proving.
Now and then, vague posts are grace.
That’s not where we are anymore.
Do you feel a need to note your own presence?
I feel silly without a carnivore
present. After a wrong turn, missing cousins
get missed. And it’s the whole team’s fault.
No one at the rooftop party NYC
could get past the taste of malt.
What is that? A small slight tree
of knowledge sustains the skittish thugs.
In Chicago there will be rooms under rugs.

8
When a poet is well-behaved, rather
than write, she says: “people have no
philosophy (muted or destroyed) (they sat there)
which was a signet (a scent that would show)
stirs occasionally the farmer
consulting his calendar.” A heap of sacks
and the Swedish saint getting warmer
is rewarded. Supplicants respond: “slacks
or no slacks, we have not only a ready
philosophy (sure works for me!) but delay
a hundred grams downstream (unsteady
vessel) Lord of the harmful effects (see, allay)
as bosom-buttons.” Protective of the butt
of this joke, I’ll say each node is a nut.

9
We’re all water, we’re all land;
we weather, we are weathered.
We’re all verdure, swiftly tanned;
we wither, come untethered.
We’re all mud, we’re all dirt,
we’re sad, so hot tears spurt.
We’re soil, we’re clay,
we imbibe and blow away.
This is fruitless now to say.
We’re all glasses of milk in Poland too.
The facets that superimpose to gray
go unsaid, and they’re all dull and true.
When the avalanche of tears subsides,
I gaze at cliffs: the gowns of brides.

10
He started looking for a new buddy.
Began, I might add,
looking for a smart understudy
who could play naturally a lad
of about twenty-seven years.
But she took it with no thanks
specializing the all-around frontiers
with taffy jars for the lobbies of banks.
We carved pinewood pizza planks, noted the fierce
egg and sad chickens.
Secretaries, the roll-top secret police,
made themselves scarce. The pickin’s
were slim. Diddly-squat daunted.
But fears were void for all who haunted.

11
They need staff
to make sure
people don’t slash or cuff
the canvases in the mature
museum hallways.
They’ll consider me a chap
who could always
be of service, be on tap.
A new kind of expression?
Whitmanian lines,
pelting precipitation
and public urination fines?
“Personally I don’t see it,” sir,
but I’ll make sure.

12
Fair enough! The sweet gentle pimp
lied to an egoist who was stoned.
At the quarry the excavators who skimp
on space are trapped by a bond
of friendship. Excuse the journalist who
looks from the bridge to the wedding,
sees stars, as journalists do,
and writes that those still getting
more bang for their buck
are in academic strongholds, like
women in general, while “my luck
seems infused with holy wreck.”
Those skipping the fine print disregarded
the prestigious ban that the quarrymen started.

13
Should I have the weed
or not? Since 1775 all trappers
have uttered foul curses at their need
while sitting on their unhoused crappers
on the upper peninsula of the ‘Burgh,
which is where I was plucked and pruned.
The city of 1805 was right to shrug
and hand the pennant on to the marooned
driver Arnold, or Arnie,
who was dumb for his journey
when he sent for a gurney
and strapped me to the unsturdy
roof of the fishing skiff. Since then,
I’ve harnessed a weed and scolded my wen.

14
Baby carrots he runs on baby carrots,
the sling on the overall health,
winking at the orange baby parents,
whistling “baby carrots” under his breath.
What’s that? You don’t want to talk about it?
Anything that’s hewn has special powers
in it and feathers of grace about it.
Weak children weeping all day in towers
write poems such as these.
I watch her lace a purple shoe,
she always asks me about cheese.
The foreign ones always do
good questions first.
(So skins don’t burst.)

15
Somewhere deeply seeded, far away from charm,
no sounds anymore saw, anymore reach.
The craniums their nests of eggs keep warm
and the nerves propagate in each ditch,
sailing away up the silt walls
of the cave. Nothing there to hear,
not even a high-pitched friction whine (false
overarching tone) or synthetically clear
voice of God saying “this is a site
of construction.” Whatever I said
before, I couldn’t’ve meant that, afire, I might
not stoop to pray. The roots are never dead,
only the upper shelves. And past that limit
I assume a comet has its own modes of entrenchment.

16
Screams, turns the page,
underlines, coughs up
what would be “rage”
if she were twenty-eight and rough stuff.
Now, it’s grief. Other singers are easy to please
and, to befriend, impossible as ever.
Note that once you squeeze
a note to make it flat, you can’t recover
the original inflation. No, that’s an inflection myth.
Avoided salt but required the deeds
of a servant. A replacement with
no shared blood, but shared needs.
The whole stint sings. Forward and back.
The phone line broods and plans attack.

17
Any time you have a detective show up
(what are they sawing in yonder kitchen?
Do your hush puppies offer up
a sour smell?), of course of crime fiction
you have the most basic, all-framing
element. The particular style
of notebook paper is always claiming
panels of cracked surmise. Meanwhile
(A man can’t sidestep a fight any longer)
once the volta erupts from the chest
of the table, the fermented savor
of crime, revirginized, is lost.
(You’re shot, you fall on the horn.)
We’re left with props if the page is torn.

18
Weapons fall from the ceiling
onto the very expensive carpet.
It’s well-known how I’ve been feeling.
You are powerless to stop it
but small improvements just might
dance before the very eyes
of the handsome pusher, whose plight
it is to sweep up every size
weapon, and distribute them among
deer in the middle of the road
in the middle of the beer-strung
capitol. They might, but my vote
is they won’t dance. Although we swat
at the air, we’re rooted to the spot.

19
Reciprocal discretion, on which society reposes
is swordsmanship. Being a formal fish,
attending relevant Broadway shows, is
the parachute whose folds swish
in the wind we ride down on, and
for the moment a complete intimacy
to plunder where we land.
Reciprocal illiteracy,
on which society slathers psychotic
amounts of ketchup, is sufficient basis
for an endless hunt, half-erotic
and “barnyard posing as oasis”
[translation mine] smack-dab in the middle
of the killing fields, a self-rebuttal.

20
The first gig was relatively well-attended.
It took place in a cathedral.
The renters applauded. None pretended
to love it too much. All wore neutral
facial expressions. The frowns relaxed
and gazes extended into brief periods
or intervals of vacancy. Maxed-
out patrons departed on chariots
and every looking thing was small or heavenly
as what it beheld. The clop of hooves
as a net was hung from evenly-
spaced intersections on a catch that moves,
lamenting capture. We hatched plans
for gig number 2 at our own expense.

21
When you’re all young, bulging your eyes
out, forcing them out of their sockets
is enough of a macabre surprise
to stuff all the people in your pockets
you possibly might want. Ten years later
you need them more, but the strained
passing elations don’t cater
to the need of keeping friends contained.
I did this, and it wasn’t a mistake.
If you keep cool and no one saves
you from the average path you make,
you learn a lesson. Upcoming enclaves
mark the change lightly, but your chance
is best, you’ve slackened to advance.

22
When I was so angry I rushed
to the poem notebook teeth first,
I had an idea that blushed
and receded. I know we’re cursed
to forget the spur’s pitch,
and for the spur once it’s sunk
in to serve not a stitch
of valve-releasing, sticking us with our chunk
of initial pressure… I forget, I forget,
I forget it, I forgot long ago,
I kept forgetting, and I say I forget
and I will, and the rim of the echo
spreads and the ocean stays whole.
But these peanuts are in my control.

23
You want to do for the next sap
something helpful. They will have lurched
from you, knowing nothing of the nap
your life was these years when you searched
for an ending like a hermit crab
you could live in. Concluding in fierce pain
each day the same. Sometimes you’d rob
to taste thicker soup, but then again
you’d go dumb. Now that’s the precise state
in which we write the cautionary manual.
Embed clauses when you go on a date,
or don’t lie, and maybe less annual
the pangs will be. No, you’ll hurt
anyway, since it looks like you’re no longer dirt.

24
Holy shit, there’s actually ringing
in my ears. Comes a “high pitched whine.”
With a future of timidly singing
“Jolly Good Fellow” in jeopardy, I’ll reluctantly incline
to have my inner ear removed and rinsed,
then screwed back into its old pore.
At thoughts of such procedures I’ve often winced
because hypochondriac imagination only goes so far.
Shoo whine, and don’t you bother
me. A catalogue of riotous bagel-bakin’ hymns
is left to be sung, to cut each tether
to the page yours truly deafly skims.
Where does this note of hope come from?
It snarls until the hate’s gone mum.

25
That’s what you get for hooking wires
up to your brain. What does spilling
water into a bottle of pills (never expires)
do again? You’re fried. Dude, telling
lies is so fun. If the talk is tranquil,
I can’t even make it out. A silo tube
of antihistamines, translucent little uncle,
is little help. I’ve been a boob
since 3AM. With my freshly ruined
corded instruments and assorted pills,
I’ll be the first boob that ever swooned.
I won’t. Pretty people give the wicked chills
to all and sundry. All “the slip” means
is you’re on the outskirts with the aid of machines.

26
Putting makeup on in the mirror in your car
looks so good. Reminds me of Tennessee.
Certain people there.
You’re a danger, but you’re quite free
to look up from the wheel at a piece
of your face just under your delicate eye
and dab it with salves to increase
desirable blurring. Then swab it away.
Stacking A, B, and C.
Someone certainly must love you.
Across the street, I briefly see
a makeup-doer, a maker-up, past her window
tinted half-dark. I feel the easing grip
of Wednesday call in hope from a hash pipe.

27
Only one thing: it’s Thursday. Now go
and make your poem. I’m waiting
for a chance to finally as a pupil know
whether you were able to start writing
a poem today and if so what it is
now that it’s over with, put down.
On a may be icy bridge, a big truck skids
at the slightest disturbance without a sound
of second thought or much of one. The waiflike mosquito
carries disease for no apparent reason, other than inlaced
spite, a tacit and unsearchable credo
that isn’t spite and could not be favorably replaced
by God itself. Then the cargo we dreaded
arrives, a drink, arranged to be wedded.

28
How many more meaningless sonnets
remain to be written? How many moods
can be divided into uneven fourths? Contents
(how they’re treated) make them sonnets, right? Or is it the words
rhyming in the right places? It’s not how much
you practice, it’s how you practice. Your potted
plants will notice whether you hock
upon them with love or drown them in spite-clotted
hard water. I live to count up from one
number to another. And jest intervenes
occasionally. And once a ten-number run
is in place, I call the stick-figure scenes
poetry. And I share with not a single soul.
But the drift and I make a cute couple.

29
She deserves access to the files of numbers
of infections. Don’t keep on keeping it hidden
because you like to be found out in slumbers
and asked for fast help. (The poems are ridden
with asking for help, rife with the concept
of help.) Once she (head baker) can get the lay
of the land, a whole pesky transept
can be taken off your hands, in a new way.
They’re a bunch of words for words’
sake and may be burned down without consequence.
Look at the hunched figure over herds
of yellow sonnet pages in public. The constance
of his pathetic whatever. Once the keys
are handed over we’ll cut these trees.

30
I think we’ve talked about this before
but do you listen to Scott Walker at all?
Me and my girlfriend actually spent more
on a house over there. I’m under your spell.
Of course with artist biographies you get a new
perspective on the work when you go back
to it. If no one speaks up I’ll be moving into
(moveables follow the person) a shotgun shack.
Who helped reach this milestone anniversary?
The propulsive action of a charge of powder.
Names were easy to remember in the nursery
because they were said more often and louder.
The snippets, though documentary, don’t cohere
around a center. So it must be a hollow sphere.

31
OK now we can start in on pain
it was fleeting it’s not on my spine
or in my fillings or singing my grin
like a mini-migraine, a quite dominant and fine
grain of anger. Because it’s always I’m pissed
taking a glance at death getting all sarcastic
no opportunity to insult ever missed
like it’s pure romance for pain’s small spastic
movements forward that make it all fleeting.
It was totally there winking and scaring
holding something at its hip like a phone
recording the whole final score-preparing,
the last composing of something of white painlike tone.
Snaking and pure and now so soon absent
but a fixture on the borders of the convent.

32
He set out to edit his first poem,
bolstered by the promise of a phone call later in the day.
He applied hand sanitizer, which canceled half the scum
out, then put sugar on it and sat down to pray.
From a distance the unedited poems plotted an arson.
Holding celery sticks laced with poison for rats,
the [redacted] gossiped to the historian about a certain person,
then burned their torches and threw them on the slats.
School began. Editing your work is vital
to taking a step, let alone several.
If the poem wishes to be vulgar or bridal
it’ll need censorship to be good and temporal.
The golden thing fell from the charred table
and shrank to a non-refundable staple.

33
Hummingbirds are pretty obviously microcosms
of our lives. Compressions. So I like them most.
The smallest of all the spectrum of winged organisms,
pure panic, sugar-craze, not much else to boast
but that their wings disappear, they work
so fast. A furor or war of wings surrounds
but they stay quite still, timid near bark
and self-caught within sweet-pursuit’s bounds.
Is it far-fetched to say they enjoy no leisure
but always cant forward at a well
of nectar to invade? If you live in the seizure
of drinks and sidewalks, the city, you can’t tell.
So you leave town. Fording chasms, believing
a hummingbird’s chase is not what you’re living.

34
Getting used to the water being cold
is for people, not ducks.
We can’t swim anywhere unless we’re told
hot to by an adult who talks
and can swim. Ducks are entering the lake
surface all the time. How does it feel?
Maybe they feel nothing, past the feathers can’t make
much of an impression. Within a moment, it’s real.
I float here now. My children on my back.
Not too sure what my orange feet are doing.
Not conscious of any of this. It’s the bad luck
of the poet to be conscious of coming and going,
trransitional stages. Also “I’m falling fast”
is never in their gut. Color me impressed.

35
How come? I called because everything was amiss.
One thing is everything. It’s one machine on rails
that are a unified system, one animus.
They referred me to someone high up in sales.
“Someone stole my brain!”
the official salesman said. We shared the cup of tea,
as you know, earlier when I tried to explain
how come curses and spittin flowed along in a spree,
but the only answer to that is “yes.”
Someone’s told you something you don’t know,
before. Asked you. They’ve made a noise or guess
and it’s left you in this state where your scope
is exceeded. Caught you with your pants…
down, or off, but it was just a temporary stance.

36
You go to camp next year. Every night,
later than is typical, your poor voice feels
bound, bound up. The threads are slight
but immovable in a bundle. What squeals
where once a cinch are now a to-do.
Brushing teeth is the only healthy, fit
distraction, the bare minimum according to
the camp’s nurse. All day you don’t quit
brushing your teeth until they shine so’s you can see
your reflection in the two big ones, clear
enough that you could talk it free,
make it a friend, a friend so dear,
apart from you and not. The following summer,
the annual visits aren’t louder, but glummer.

37
The history of telephones: someone’s in pain
and they want to share it. Buttons are pushed,
a tone happens, and the victim must abstain
from spilling over until the doctor’s unrushed
greeting “hello” stops the idle tone.
“Hello” is said. Various screens and tools
are added. Mine drowns of its own
accord, seemingly. The inventors are obviously fools.
The joke’s always on someone, with these calling
devices. You first. Then the ones who took
the things to market. A. Graham-Bell was only stalling
until he could afford a down payment. A book
was by him ever preferred. I’ve omitted a few
chapters from the history, to keep it true.

38
Why is a question mark shaped like that?
The shepherd’s crook is broken. That’s it, right?
We start at a point, a guy at bat,
then spin off in an arcing, returning flight
in a vessel that skews left,
a wonky airplane of inquiry. That return trip
is aborted. Sound good? The launched craft,
or duckling, is “following suit.” We skip
from circumnavigation to conclusion.
Disconnection of pod from root, the pod
implied but not canceled, not an illusion
unless we get too literal, too like God.
Are any of these close? You have the answer,
who make of me such an asker, who are my sponsor.

39
Museums. They’re mature. I’m of hearing.
Hard of hearing. An adherent. Believer,
one who practices it. It is adhering
that makes a museum. I’m somewhere
between mature museum and “content
creator.” So scared to call cool people
up! I’ve seen a Madison, Wisconsin sunset.
I’ve approached the concept of the nipple
from a few angles. Don’t need to reach
either vertex. I’ll be on the middle
of the line. One of the infinite. It’s such
a blessing to be here, so arguably little.
A point has no friends or any dimensions.
Wings of museums may suffer extensions.

40
When it was acceptable, it didn’t move,
nor could it in the empty room make sleep
happen at all, suffering the stiff shove
of its infirmities. My soul. A turtle without a peep
hid in its shell, until a gust of wind
the animators injected gave it a boost
so it could escape the wolf that grinned
and bloomed over it. The cat come to roost.
In this home there are also a few key points
that the animated things wander between.
The guests, imaginary, choreograph their haunts,
mosying, sidling, swept from curtain to scene.
Since it darts and frets from pot to pan,
flesh will see corruption, but it won’t scan.

41
Forward like a criminal, begging mercy of everything I meet
into the street today without companion,
Florida of the month this heart’s one pleat
of uniform fantasy all down the onion,
We leave Saturday and come back next night
having extended shockingly few invitations.
Idolatrous power lines, and paint’s foresight
about the road wished for more petitions.
This poem is impossible for me to penetrate,
though I wrote it. Opening up the shop
is never purely easy. On the small plate
of courtesy I see a crumb, apply a mop.
When we beg, the solitude between the lines
is sacred, but so is the eye that grinds.

42
Flies and new interests absorb you; now you never have
them. Caveat: the master volume fluctuates.
The one covering the comforting song is suave
as comfort and as fleeting; he evaporates.
We’re out in public. With a few tweaks
we’re the public eye. But queasily it shorts,
or it can; I’m referring to the nerve that squeaks
past the gate of bone and watches sports.
New interests exist: binoculars unfolded
and turned to the sugar packet
torn open on the table. They are molded
to the new part, but are no more than a racket
at rehearsal in the galley under the text.
It takes my hand, and am I now perplexed!

43
Dear sister, remember when I showed you how I draw
squares when I have a moment to spare
for art or meditation? I showed you the law
of my graph paper, how trembling along each square
my pen moves. A little world irrelevant
to your real life as a mother. A viable
escape you detected in this, a shameless element
of entry into a page. Stupid and reliable.
Well, I’m doing it again. I need a grid
because it’s a cave wall, but also I’m lying
if I say I need it. At halftime I know life did
little to merit the desperation with which I’m drying
ink into these repetitive little useful quads.
But it’s a real desperation that over me trods.

44
A dead wasp in the middle of the floor
last night I saw when I was about
to go to sleep. I didn’t sweep the poor
thing up but let it lay dead and lay out
on the wood floor, cold. Gasp! Mack the knife!
The vilest little reverences can be the pillar
of truly familiar countenances. It isn’t safe
in here, house fly, because of the indifferent killer.
But I mean there was no expected course
of action I was supposed to take for the dead
wasp. Just to see it was where the source
of contemplation pumped into my little old head
a good death dream, maybe. Now blue sky is smiling
at me; I’ve elegized my little wasp darling.

45
The new date for enjoying life is soon
arriving. Two ways to pronounce every word
my mom texts me. A richness causing a swoon
that invincible shyness can’t make seem absurd.
To enjoy life I listen to a playlist I hate.
Mix the light with the dark. Pointlessly say
“I am relaxin’” by way of issuing a late
greeting to someone I’ve been ignoring all day.
Principles of morality are like a dirty cap
that must be laundered.
“Hell yes indeed” says the bottle of detergent; I swap
drawing lots of squares for assaying the plundered
stuff. Morning is going. It’s not here to stay.
Hey I really liked your poems the other day.

46
“Everyone’s so talented! I fell in love with a lady
who made these vases. I couldn’t afford
[to buy] [one of them] but I looked and they were pretty
each one. I thanked her for them. I implored
her never to stop making her vases.
We didn’t get married or anything.
But we’re still on a first-name basis.
She’s in my thoughts. I often plan on offering
goods and services to her. No, I most
certainly will not. Oh, everyone has such talent.
I saw a woman who put faces on toast
by scraping it. She found me repellent
but I don’t care. It’s my joy just to find
these people. Maybe it’s their joy to be unkind.”

47
The routine of the countess’ delights:
say the word “fly” to myself. Ask what he’s
guarding. And it’s not the center of our nights
but the sun’s the center of our world. Freeze
a freakish movie, sweet-pea, those faded leaves
for a long time display. Sulfuric acid
might have made it. The countess grieves
her zestless office, every nonsense-facet,
and then the old pleasures really get old.
Quaint climax to the struggle, physical weariness
from a sufficient altitude seems not to have stalled
but hardened. What happens when, baroness,
someone knocks at your door asking can they use
your phone. A huge waste of time ensues.

48
To say “goodbye” at the precise instant of leave-taking
so everyone can hear “good” but no one can hear “bye”…
you disappear halfway into the stock phrase, breaking
off the blessing from the single reason why
you had to give it. Look at them standing dumb,
wondering why you said “good” before you were gone
forever. They can sense that it is some
miracle, just the right tic, with no ill to spawn.
Just a thought. Not a syllable wasted.
But that isn’t decline. Our lives don’t end when we stop
saying them! Rather, we break bad news. Nonsense will have outlasted
sentence, scraps of wood on the floor of the shop.
At the zoo with a lemur slung around my neck,
graduating at a distance like a lens speck.

49
Fuck. Another foul-mouthed playwright.
Shit should have been sweet and good.
Now it’s all ass. It all being ass ain’t right.
Fucking put me in a terrible fucking mood.
Jesus Christ. It’s open season on moods.
All fucked to hell. And right before the end.
Was supposed to be a simple day in the woods
now it’s very fucking important not to be bland.
“That is every barista’s dilemma,” I’ve heard.
Dammit, I’m a yes man, so if you say shoot
that guy I go and do it, as if it’s your weird
compulsion to shoot him I say “well that’s cute.”
Now that’s a huge flaw. But I still don’t fuck
with playwrights like that (seemingly rather stuck).

50
Talk to you later. Breathless. Out of steam.
Actually tried to climb a real wall.
Climbed a wall by a waterfall in a dream.
It made me feel strong. I looked for a waterfall
for days. Basically, there are none nearby.
And then the false memory of physical strength faded.
I was halfway up a brick wall that was dry.
Human bodies don’t do that though. We only waited
out the years to survive this long.
We’re good at enduring long periods of idiocy.
I fell off the wall and collapsed a lung.
The hospital nurse and I developed no intimacy.
Try as I might to set up a neural
pathway. I’ll call you later, to thwart any spiral.