I’m a doll-house medic.
I find myself salving
the cauliflower ear
of a concrete jockey
some jackass rashly
painted too pink to be
even considered
a drunken homunculus,
trammeled-tarantula stanchion
tangramming chip by chip this
witless expression of awe or glory
or scratched serendipity, sunk
in some swollen stoma stabbed in the
toe of a jelly-bean-boiled
stack-laminate jenga post-
mastectomy shoppe by the bygone
six-dollar milkshake store.
Six dollar shake store—Jesus.
Happened to frequent the shake store, yes.
They were retrofitting it. Once,
in a hedgerow coif of ersatz English ivy,
was scribbled in wriggling neon,
My God, you’re beautiful. Now,
it was dubbed, Rebound, an anemic
marquee bent mirroring spindly
bone to be read as, now
thrice in passing,
Do Right and
Kill Everything, maybe
an awkward anagram—Jesus, Miriam, Joseph
Beth—
It made the Dairy Queen
slounch like an Auschwitz
shower cap fixed with a
winking propeller.
I’ve a waffle-coned
wrought iron armature
‘twixt my teeth—and
what was this plaster,
stodgy as sheetrock
snapped in a fizzling fit about
who brayed bird whistles better,
supposed to be—blood, say. Restless
legs and a nose like a dog whistle,
finicky spittle, Sibelius, swans in the
snowflakes, puddling milk-solid
skin, and my wry-necked spine like
the rheumatoid bread ties choked round
wire-wrapped knuckles and
some instructive finger, groping
your throat for a dulcet pulse. Just
throw me a goddamned
bone, already. Let’s make something,
anything out these lath board breasts. Recall,
how a bird whistle rattles the talc
or the spoondrift-sleep-rocks clean
from a wincing window, sills lolled,
lapping at cracks in the chockablock
sidewalk, veins of a manged or
manicured hydra pressed from
the same irrepressible humus
as you, my love, too pink to be
real—the same thrawn spark that
urges us, too, the pink elephants
scrunched from a hundred
forgotten carnations, to mulishly
bury our dead; how the city had
swollen from litters of retrofitted
graveyards, lest we forget it. Now,
how your scrofulous eyes, like
listing Adena mounds thundering
under the undulous marl
what alarming god had
disturbed them from—forevermore
maybe transfixed in distorted explosion,
the beached whale’s bone-studded waiting room;
all in the name of eternity teasing
a dryad’s wrist to a dowser’s wand,
as an ash tree groomed to a novelty
baby spoon, something
that even the jellied burgoo refuses
to study or cling to.
