While I don’t endorse this 
opinion, it lolled like this, 
and who am I to just awkwardly alter it:
 
a musculature 
of osier creeping up 
over the kinked and dis-
tending pipe dream, fumaroles
choking on funnier things than
flags you think you’ll stake before you’re
baked back into the bone-picked clay—I’d 
 
rather just marvel
at how my umbrella grown
gingko gold bursts forth with the
verve of Rachmaninoff beat upon
buckets and slingshots; how
 
my whole body refuses to prune
in a rainstorm—how I make cracks
                                  about just how 
                                  hard it seems to
                                  hopscotch over the
    lilypad conibear cereal maze called
working a deadend job for fear of just
feeling like maybe those deathbed con-
   fessions might dare outlast the arrest-
   ing madlib eulogies marking my dry   
   disembarkment—how I could fold 
 
and enclose in a 
kudzu’d glove 
compartment
all of these
things 
these
prune-squishy mittens’ve 
                made or minced,
 
all the vegetables split,
all the words scribbled over,
like stickers suggesting an end to acne—
 
was it all just too tacky or shitty to cling
upon anything other than pity? The world
 
we commonly frame as a smoldering
dumpster now, the blue-ribbon cow
found fielding the world with shit
swoln over its stall-studded shanks, this 
Know-Nothing Party manqué sort-of 
enfant terrible who’s siphoning 
how many years worth of medicaid 
just for a bean feast spangled with 
lethal machinery, all of those 
blossoming burn marks scouring what 
was an almost virginal old Manitoba, all
of the soles misplaced with malice or simply
shuffled like waterlogged Monty cards among 
fish-gutted, mussel-eyed, slavering tyrannies—
all of this ushering under the clouds now, yet, 
 
I’d more rather marvel
at how my umbrella grown
gingko gold bursts forth with the
verve of Rachmaninoff beat upon
buckets and slingshots—maybe
 
that makes me the glib village idiot.
 
The glib village idiot’s burial’s 
borne beneath bright yellow 
Tonka trucks and rain and sparklers. All
 
that I ask is that somebody hold 
my umbrella up over my swollen plot
that seemed, perhaps, too apt a metaphor,
 
arguing anyone’s left who can tenderly
dandle its odin-eyed duck head, braced a-
gainst all those winds that Dylan kept tangling 
 
up into little blue bilious hymns.