—a soft shoe whistle
lapped over the bathroom
walls,
            the powdery paws of a cat,

slack traces of nameless Pinocchio pacing
the balding switchbacks lolled from a straightening
rem state,
                    what burled blocks piqued proud
                                 of the cat’s tongue tickling
                                 fleas into taciturn
                                 roadside attractions, much
                         like driftwood
                        clumped in a buckling
        dam

        that the dry-washing river
        massages or bloodlets
        into this mock-up of
        Hadji Ali, who’d
   gargled the verdigris
scum of a wishing well
into disjointed
music—                                scattershot puce and
                                               mint-to-be shreds of

                                             Pennies from Heaven, perchance.

A mechanical bank
worked down from a rock
with a cat-tongued thong throbbed,
star-cinched grip of a golem
the dippers had churned
from a trilobite fossil
interred in a sleep-rocked spall of slate;

a mechanical bank
relenting—letting the
                     loll of a coin assuage its
                     bones,
                                  its tidldibab
                                  bird bones
                                  buckling
                                  graceful
                                  as guts of a
                                  chuckling
                                  cuckoo clock,
                                  to churn

of what frail wish flipped clumsily;
what gruff brush strokes lapped ‘long the velveteen
neck of a catling, eyes licked verdigris green
as abandoned pennies peer up amongst
roiling wellsprings; what lush talcum
                                     so softly alit upon
                                     dander pricked
                                     in the ken
                                     of a velvet Elvis,
                                     in dream; to churn

of which seam-ripped rivet such purring
or whistling summoned from seemingly nothing
more hard and fast than the pass of phantasmal     

            hands,

which urge our driftwood Pinocchio, Dance—