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. . .
