Here I say: dark shadow
Brambles called my mother from July
Humbled the old red jacket in a racket of silent insects
And their needles, all these beetles
Of July

And here I say: red shadow
Meet the racketeer in his damp alley, wear your Sunday face 
Vanish hopelessly soon, but not from fear, that second jeering Nally
In the alley

At last I see: blue shadow
Lost to frosting engines in your liquid stomach
Pummel midnight's bark, the lark ...

    our eyeballs glazed with blue
marking our bodies and suffocating blue
lipped.
    (in a fire, crawl to reach the door. The blazes rise, and gases from the floor)

    Lest you are assumed among the dead
quaking in that solemn trap of gauze, or withered by a mother’s fearsome gaze.
    No sir, we will not sing of grace.
    
    We sing assured that she was always dead
    and held aloft to keep us in...

    There is that mangy spirit
Decrying my bald excess, my printed
Natty jackets, the hand dyed
    Covers of my bed, the painful
Murals, ratcheting up these many years
With every layered layer
    
    No more hospital white expanse
So easy to clean. I am the bowerbird!
    I plaster the walls with origami paper
    My pens are everywhere!

And she who daily labors will have leisure
And she who nightly yearns will look into brimming faces of comfort, and be known
And she who is a neighbor will wave to her neighbor when they pass, and offer to watch the kids in times of sickness
And she who is young will bike in the summer, and know the houses of her friends, and visit unannounced,
    No pressure, if you're free I'm free. If not, I'll see...

 
Heir apparent to my errant yearnings, bucking like a yearling
In the spit-foam drift, 
 
Sweet with contrast’s emphasis, the skin beneath the brine
Upon that brow, yoking to a throat-deep growl
A contra-basso yawning of a cliff’s cave mouth, inviting me to dive
(Capelin spatter the stones with spawn, sex-suicide.)
 
It’s you who daily wears the rock apart, forever seeking even 
As you yield,
 
The smoothness that once puckered yet adapts to leaden pressures, yet arises ...