I would be sad without potato chips
but much worse if you chopped off my arm.
Being sad is a form of exsanguination
so perhaps to the bottom of sadness I could get
as I bled to death. I do not know.
I do not want to know.
Already you took my turtle
and left me the plastic pond dish
and plastic palm tree
then gave me my first funeral.
We buried a jewelry box.
I don’t want a spider quadrupling
in the center of my chest, oh spider of pain.
Here, take my Babe Ruth stamp,
my Day of the Dead skull man
with the elk head on top of his.
I do not own a pair of castanets
but take those too. Perhaps
you could edifyingly divert yourself
with 19th-century Russian novels
where awful things happen even though
people think a lot. A lot. Maybe because?
Check out this book of Gorky drawings
especially page 74 but do not take
Brenda, not even one piece
even though you take her mother
who takes a Brenda-piece along with her,
that, I know, can’t be helped.
And do not take my love
while she is at her windsurfing lesson
or anywhere between. You already took
her wallet and charged a houseful of furniture,
terrible ottomans, hideous divans, corpuscular easy chairs
before she even noticed, you are that quick!
But how slow you were with my dad,
tooth by tooth, gasp by gasp,
I could tell he was afraid.
I looked down the road
where someone was buying shoes.
Is it possible to choose a pair
solely by the prints they’ll leave
in the dust and snow?
I know you have a job to do,
without you there would be no beauty,
no nitrogen cycle or atmosphere or cantaloupe.
No gleam without a maggot, no cloud
without tears, how it smells like iron
then it rains and rains and rains.