Someone has left the building. The building is now
a rubble of bones. Butterflies are sometimes kisses,
but mostly larvae. Language: a cocoon to emerge into.
To come down from the tree means breaking
a bough. Rocking to wake. The world is a nursery
and rhymes are waves. To be a person describing
is to be a rat scavenging at the crumbs of language
for the remains of thought. Holiness has nothing
to do with it. Yet, meringue. Yet, music.
Yet, everything. In other words, divinity is a shoebox
at a science fair for the other words. I am not sure
my words are my own. I walk past a bookshelf
and read How Nature Works. I read how nature works
in the spinning of a silk worm. Someone reads out loud,
“How nature works.” To be awake in the world
means to be aware of sleeping. I won’t survive language.
Language is the only way to survive. Thank goddess,
I was never given a god to flounder for. A man with a tie
can be an instrument of violence. Why not say so?
For fear of being locked up, we keep our wisteria
to ourselves. I am bursting dragonfruit, pulling cards
and reading. The definition of “apocalypse” is “to reveal.”
So what if my language is pleased with itself?
To speak at all has been a travail. I am cacophonous
now, a body of scales dragging along the sand.
Don’t mind me while I feast on oil fumes.
How are we still manufacturing plastic foam?
Even fairies need to breathe. The slot machine
dings. Any money I get needs to be cleansed.
Who has the power to move the currency of thought?
Whose hook is in my cheek? I eat puzzles for lunch.
A bomb goes off in a break room. If the poem is a vine,