dummy

Antifreeze and cough syrup are mixed up in my head when I think about it.
There are not enough detectives. The cold-medicine aisle. The cold–outside,
in Billings, it’s twenty below. And I’m thinking about an iceberg–how many
therms can escape it, how fast. And pretty soon it doesn’t matter: if you’ve
touched the motor, or if you’ve split the wind, or if you’ve only cut the small,
red blister that forms between my thumb and index a week from now, opening
your letter. Because it never gets tiring.

I want you to accept the metal cabinet for what it is: a crazy place. And I’m
thinking: a tic. A mirror; nervous magnification. Like ten seconds of Radar
O’Reilly, coping. But it would be fine for you, you could even watch. Through
wet-glass. On-screen. I carry you. I put you in my back like an enormous stoop.
We go up.

Because that is the sound for me: I can do anything. Maybe years from now,
I’ll be an old fool too tired to know. Or on a blood-pressure machine, mixed in
with thoughts about radiation, about what I’ll have to do if the results say X,
say Y… I’ll be drawn to pills. Maybe then I’ll do what they say, maybe I’ll
take them. But no one will be able to tell me anything, about you.

Before I wake up, in sleep
she starts masturbating, on the machine.
And she is telling it, brilliant
machine, I love you you are the best machine ever.

And it is very hot, she is
taking her things off and giving them to me.
Her shield, her corset.
I take them to the pile and burn them.

I want…. I wish. I wish
this could be the night we take the machine apart
to see how it works.
I want to try the levers.

And that one–the loudest.
Making the man and woman in the next room
moan.
Suck me. You’re sweating.

And all that noise,
my god. I don’t think she understands it,
why she doesn’t just let me touch her.
Why I don’t just touch her.

This could be about something, but not what we say it is.

1. Vitruvian Man

rubber
wizard
tong
demerit
chief eagle
chief outliner        chief
lucky astronaut
lucky caller
smear-cap      at the night

on the stand, everybody lied
it came back, it bled
the image was a passenger
whiter than us all

they said no one would believe it
we needed to debate this
“rich dichotomy”
I heard them
“dot dot dot dot” (& confess the)
“list list list list”

Leonardo, you made it all up

2. dampened

Tonight I feel like one million eggs in the psych ward.
Very come on. Very my backless gown and my hairy
legs. So let’s polish the body. Let’s baste the turkey.
You and I have one hundred dollars and a fair die.
So let’s spend it here. We won’t be glowering at a lake
forty years from now and blaming each other. We will
know where to get gunned. And if the garbage chute
is the truer meaning (after all) I think it is amazing.
O baby, gut the house and get back to me.

3. “A very private matter, sir”

Have we concluded?
How so?
You and I were old enough to hold weapons.
We are.
These gleaming tips.
This rugged exercise.

I could say,
we’ve got to tilt the ballet, Dorothy,
make a chair out of our fingers
and draw them fangs, a cloak over their buttons.
But they don’t want us to fix it.

One day I will fall out of the sky into your oven. I will say to you Betty Crocker, you better cook me. Cover me in vegetables and disgusting sauce. Put a white apple in my mouth. I will lick it like a newborn. Because, I am like that. I am not your innuendo or ear infection or even a carrier of this disease. I am the beast who talks. [& sometimes wills.] So shoot me. Cook me. Beat me with your mallet. Things are shaggy in here and I am not afraid to say so.

I don’t know, George. It’s like I’ve been saying about the last century: an abnormal amount of wet. It’s like we had to evolve a certain je ne sais quoi–a blade–to cut the sponge from the kelp. To shake it loose. To clench it. In the end it didn’t taste so good. Perhaps that’s my bad. I didn’t make the meat, I know, au jus. But we live in a bloody age and I like you a little, still. So bite down on my finger, once more. And remember– I am not going to do this again.

or, how to be.
How to leave the opaque with the barren,
the crushed with the underfoot, with the bruised.
Where I’m not sodden or shepherded or otherwise -herded
or obligated, or even trusted, too much.
Not antiquated, not pastoral, not in-vogue.
But like a fall god, an old and red and dignified and remote god.
Alien-cold and spore-spawn covered, covered with fine weeds.

It’s how I would like to be–like a field. Wounded,
but old enough to be reticent about it.
Muddy in a few places where the football team
has been practicing. Vomit, blood from an elbow.
With chalk all around that’s leaked in a fine dusting
from the spreader, the lines crisscrossing, the out-of-bounds zones.

But not so unified for you. Esp. by the chain-link
there’s a cut place where the strays and truants come.
It’s how they get through. It’s how you got through.

So you can stand and smoke with your back to the gymnasium
after the pep rally and see your breath puffing hard
and not feel ashamed about it.
That I won’t accept your ticket.