Sometimes I
conceive of myself
as a bare-bones pall
of piano strings clumsily
filter-feeding flat-white
fuzz and frissons to
maybe Romanian music
or knock-kneed klezmer cramped
in a blood-letted bean tin—I
had a dream this morning where
Robin Williams offered, in parting,
my partner a lock of his hair, like a date
knotted plump with stiff cuttlefish ink
seized into a Fabergé-gordian-dollop of
maybe tobacco-scented licorice; albeit,
in her accepting it in the dream, the grass
springs maybe a little more gingerly,
maybe the shiso, the sun’s scratched
into a flurry of shattered cathedral glass
that’s froze in its fall from the frothing
mullions, seems just
a bit more
burgundy, burgundy wine now, mind you,
maybe—————and yet among what
warped moire of muttering maybes, mewling
spalls of me tethered to beetle-bare dander
and dandruff the wind’s still dandling, I
can see, clearly as blood-letted mullions
might bare teeth in simply simpering, how
I’m the Robin, the partner, the candied tress,
a forever unchartered identity dimpling
mud in a date-brown run of pahoehoe
and shapely sun. The starling’s song
still riddles the air with a frame I still
shan’t dare to fill and what weird name
claims Blueberry Hill any more than
Gobbler’s Knob
