Cabinet of bruises, long use, chipped plates, misplaced odds
Ended up in a little less light, darkened by the cracked door and bent hinge.
The knee connects the feet as marchers press and knot their uniform ties and
The smoke mixes with heat and mud in the memory,
Broken out one side, shattered by age.

There is no reason for us to argue.
All of the world smokes and rots and
The passion for preservation is the tinkling glass of
My words falling with you down the hole by the underpass
Where the lorries wait with their crews.

The drafty wit and time of decline
Calling us back to ourselves to unearth heaven.
The Buddha touched the palm of suffering.
The reign of agricultural labor was to last ten thousand years.
A hundred beginners at the pole with sashes and banners and
Proclamations meant to keep at bay the influenzas, the pox,
And the maggot born cleaners of bones – each with her roles assigned.

The Tee Pee of our dream on the navel of the plain
Could light the enemy’s grass and send scurrying
The modern sensibility for turning facts over and over
Until the object of utility is her own brazen revolution
Of what comes from births.

Siblings, cousins,
Feathers of the sky bird and ground lizard
Come to help explain to us the air, the water and
The certainty of demise.

A few more digressions pile on the reason’s bus,
Busting tires and straining, packed up the pass with people on the roof.
Tell us more that we have arrived than that there is a long way to go.
Some of us have to use the bathroom.
Caged creatures, the beatitudes begun a little early, transcribed,
But still on paper with original translation in the reference notes.
In the how to manual.
In the cribbed summary of authorial intent imbibing the angel food of white breath
And the strained mayonnaise of hope’s limitless tractus on
Being at peace with the will,
On servility being as a good table or chair that holds you.

The fires of the West and tombstone tumbleweed guns that clatter
That fell the winged serpent in her colorful plumes,
Full of poison she plunged a thousand feet
Like a smoking wing, a bad habit kept too long talking at the door,
Tapping at the window to get in.
What is a woman to do?

Shop full of utensils,
Stacks of ambient letters from the rehearsal she thought she could use
As light shades or wall paper.
Desdomona,
Cats everywhere, rub against me your purring face,
Your need and the fakes paraded to protect you.
Old goddess of the fire hearth and of hushed conversations
And death pending the completion of lists,
The sacrifice of calves,
The opening of blistered skin,
Ankles wracked like rivers,
Shivers of the horse in the ice cold current.

Tiger lairs and bowers of nesting gorillas – the war.
Pancake breakfast by the debris of broken buildings,
The flooded cabinet and burning barrels of open lots
Pursuing original intent.

She decided to “re-wild” her imagination as a fruit bat
Might hang upside down sheltered in the skin of wing and
Twitch of all the others nearby watching.

We gave our wretched money and coughed up vomit at the Shaman’s tent-
The circle too blighted by thick smoke-
The rugs filled with suspicious sand,
Counting the number of hands and
Cousin Mescalito and Ayahuasca pin prick the purpling stars of face
Wounded as a beating, thighs and backs bruised by the promised cargo
Now enslaved by empty passage and dithering.
The old throng at the docks with planks and bales,
The surge of supplies to challenge the direction of the river
As if day time was everywhere – All at once.

And all at once
The vision dance, the cerulean blue squeezed from the painter’s tube,
The rasp of bar song voices
Finding the curtain rise and
People know that they get what they want here,
Moving their bodies.

A better time, a better place,
A face fine as almonds,
Heart’s supplicant meandering and mending the land
As mist must someday douse all of our fires in rest and contentment,
The giving over to death what is hers all along
Of faces and tractors and the blowing dust and seeds.
The fog is enough to dampen our socks,
Used on our scratchy red ankles
As a moustache or a shackle,
As a necklace of burnt offering,

Three days of beard
Waiting with the bowls of all others empty
At last to move on,
Hungry but unencumbered.