In agitation along sleep’s surface
dreams the monster, the angular, the slimy, the anything goes, the corpse
who strokes the tigers with rather weak jaws
in a jump cut, on an icy blue couch, red queen
on mute–
the nearly taken, the just-about-to-escape voices caught midstream
say they do not want the story to end when what they mean is
how do we separate
the next night from its screwed-in
light, the weariness of fearing a man in the dark comes a blade out of nowhere
while visionaries we carry like pepper spray
play hangman, visit solitaire,
clear clouds off the moon
genitalia gently shaped into other genitalia
the brain fluid in its cave each to their own needs
and the old wandering in black robes, opossums, the star magnolia
stilling, trembling, coyotes, foxes,
rats, red and blue states commingled into a silvery waxy balm
with ocher highlights and peach
undertones, a cosmogony
grown distant, unconstituted,
darkness materializing
until every house–if there is a house–
becomes more a faint shed in an interplanetary dust, apothecary-like, something it
would take
a fluoroscope to see–
And the women weep because they have been violated
and not for the first time, and the men clench through what they have done
and the men who did not do it and did not not do it
learn to stand next to the women
a shoulder-to-shoulder thing and the women and the men
who had been violated get so exhausted they lie down to spoon
with all who have been violated the women who did it
The softest of sheets fall
A clef of music occurs
Images (almond soap, tea tree oil) tossed like
wash on wash, clean laundry on top of dirty.
Fascism, facial, fascism, facial,
requiring all the oxygen would inevitably become an elegiac outcome for the human.
Storying all night and dead asleep all day Scheherazade said
she did not want to finish when what she meant was
stay, I am a spirit just coffining up his dream timer.