After eating three

cookies, lacunae

bunged with marijuana,

I laugh until the green

tomatoes, jarred whole

in my stomach, ripen

sideways, the radio’s

static answers in triplicate,

and leaves pigtailed

around the twin stems

of my African milk tree

sew up the mantel’s

wounds. I’m alone,

glaciated.

I close my eyes and fall

into an ocean inside

my mouth, teaming with

discombobulated phrases

politicians left behind

from the last election

cycle. Their funereal

words lie dammed in

crags along shore.

A platoon of beautiful

bourgeois ladies comb

the jagged shoreline

in search of barnacled

ad hominem and spools

of algae latticed with

false dilemmas. Soul-

craft’s odds and ends

finish me with their own

apportioned mysteries.

Like a weathervane seduced

by warring squalls, I lie

in wait for a memory.

Old man Blackburn

wringing a pigeon’s neck,

the severed, quaking torso

driven mad in the ecstatic

boil of the Texas sun,

the new world order lip-

synched by the butchers

of Bucha, the bluing

sweetness of Z’s cousin,

wrecked by love, tramping

across the yielding tiles

of assisted-living, feet

bunkered in soft, zebra-

striped slippers.

I stare into an unshared

darkness, listening to

a coughing phonograph

needle banging its head

against dead wax.