Rekindling what 
was once the world’s 
most ticklish siblingship
with this woe-webbed, 
corn-cob compartment
condensed to a sun-
burnt Gremlin’s center
console, rapt with the
flint-snapped submarine
screech of an earthworm,
trying to fill out the girth
of a culvert or softly dis-
tend its brekekek borders to
what cracked cradle Atlantis is
dandled in still, its arhythmic
lurch now matching the
march of your heart come
times when your trembling,
tickled with
               what—
 
The soap dispenser expressed
a cartoonish Italian accent in
spitting its rose-scented suds.
Had Pontius Pilate just found
himself tromping through poppies
to see or neglect what shapes he’d stretched
in the fly’s-eyed dew—all the scurrying 
                                       snakeskin shed
                               that the sun swept
                   under the roots of some
         virginal sycamore elsewhere,           maybe
a shoal where ever much more than the mangroves 
bare their roots, where the soul’s svelte
breakers appear among even the rose-
scented soap scum, jellyfish fizzling
over the hopefully shoaling palm—
 
And such was, frankly, enough
to furnish the dollhouse honey-
comb mood of a rude revolution,
attempting to just upturn what
withering rictus, icing the easy-
bake state house, what no-
girls-allowed sort-of cork-
board contraption en-
snared in a shiver-
ing sycamore, one
nearly having now
bought the farm.               And
 
that was, to say the least, this
devious seed of it stirring
in cringing, cramped,
and crepitant 
        concrete—pearl-licked 
                            pavement only
                            the chittering rain
                            or pain-pinched sweat
                            or illiterate tears pressed,
                gloam of a gasping giggle, should
                            tickle or prickle or
                            nettle or nibble so
 
plainly,
strangely 
nacreous,
pockmarked,
echoing everything, even
the stars incensed in some snickering 
snow-globe remark about soap
dispensers, talking in tongues, still
cudding a sticky tack tap root back to 
ante-antiquity’s plants reborn among
plastic imparted with, was that an
accent—