Life like an onion of old 

animation cels scrunched 
in this tulip bell bulb of a paint
by numbers dream unfurling in triplicate, each 
 
now threadbare polaroid Bacon had
bent and distressed in obsession with 
peerless beauty stickily sinewed and 
jelly-skinned under an echo of Brecht’s 
last stand with Tail-Gunner Joe and the
hunchbacked plumbers and glaziers of
doddering Hollywood arguing Gysin’s
whirligig-origami-Muybridge-plaything
(horses hole-punched into, perchance, 
 a succession of 
 far more meaningful 
                      flickers)
                                    must clumsily be 
                             filled in or condemned—I
 
                     just woke up, 
     still strung twixt drugs
       the brain should foist, the
      joists of a stammering dream,
      and the coffee and cigarettes
      shaking me much as you’d dare
               not shake a baby; and
 
strange how the emblem
for Tri-State Plumbing suggests
but a teaspoon—dig?
 
is that what’s squeezed
from the buckling gin head, all
of these tender plants that 
       nature perfected, that
Mucha reflected in slithering
symmetry, teased to but bent-
                  in irony trying to 
                  elbow the world to what
                  puddles up, bubbling 
                  frogspawn thick, in a
                                              shriveled umbilical
                                              life-line bored to a
                                              ticklish navel—
a gaze 
of raccoons are
washing some berries they’d
plumbed from a smoldering 
dumpster, dunking them
 
pip by pip and
paw by paw in
a pothole, shimmering,
blistered obsidian, cudding
the sun into what was the word-
less verve of a mouth unwound from
finicky energy feigning some lightning
locked beneath barely a bottletop, barely
a burnt-out bullet of crumbling cork. . .