The neck hangs by a thread of blood and nerve
Up from the foot, circling the groin, the heart and lungs,
Eyes and mind.

The table of sleep is a feast of forgetting.
The content of unhappiness blown around like a bag.
Poor old highway, city of stranded pedestrians
And the vote gets lost.

Tell the muddy hands of summer streams
That the banks can’t hold their money,
Tell us our time is come.
Cash in the pigs.
Let’s go.

I fell asleep at the counter of the abattoir
Counting coins as round as faces,
Places with market squares and triangles of reason
Connecting the seasons of man.
Blemishes on womanhood,
Duties of childhood,
The lines stretched around the block.

The guns and the money tattoo became as popular as mother
And skulls and boats, ships at sea
Passing the edge of the world where the water falls.
Where the flat lands still have a few wrinkles of mountains.
Where eye juice, tears of monkeys,
Saline bagged and dripped like an IV into the uncaring sea.
Totals track up the arms of suburban junkies,
White as powder, smooth as plastic,
Addicts of acetylene in buildings of brick,
Crumbling mortar and broken glass.

The soul loves a window on the world,
Waiting like a hotel
For something to happen in the ballroom.
The shore line, the pit fire, the kiln,
Dry as bird’s nest or round as the tika well,
Tightly holding its black water,
Its sombrero against the sun
With the moisture in our eyes shining.
The sorghum in the fields waving like dirty blades
Only lit gold in the twilight, twice a day.

To work in between as at pillar and post
Investing the labor and foresight in stone
Against fire, against water and the blowing ash,
The rising flood as a darkening horizon,
Crouched on the mat, on the threshold of your dreams
Urging as you drift off
To wake and sleep later,
Feel the teeming of ancestors and
The quiet breath of your girl
But it is too late,
You are sinking,
Subsumed as all others on the great turn of forbearance
Finally giving the night its dewy dreams
And the best of ourselves ungiven, erased
Unforgivable.