A Tangled Head in a Ten Foot Ditch
Image courtesy of the author. Greenwich, NJ (December 2021).
there are no cannibals in london
only academics with copper pots
he makes no allowance for the undertaking
of going to the grocery store
a tuesday in the dairy aisle
he buys two cartons of milk three of yogurt
twenty grains of rice to lie across his doorstep
let me pass the checkout aisle
pass scanners pass money
pass faded faces staring from faded ink
home he cooks a steak
he eats very little
vacancies line his stomach
I considered my courses the way the wind bent
around my ribbed body a warning
a ceiling fan the clanging of a rail
in the months of november and december
he replaces the soap the laundry basket
the telephone wire the bird feeder
the echoes in the living room
I prepared myself
washed my brain nine times a day
lobe after lobe after lobe
until my skin burgeoned red
in the months of november and december
he replaces his eyes his arms
his larynx his tendons
with a bottle now floating in the thames
another year congratulate me
on watching the laundry dry on a washing line
congratulations the methodology of madness
a birthday card two days early
and he stains the kitchen table
with the shatters of him
—
he plays himself
in every other dream
his mind floods
a drip a pen drops
a drop of water
skitters across a cracked spine
darkness spreads ink to newspaper
his radio in a house that never knew
how it was to be tangled
to be weighted to wear to fissure
in places there never were before
sometimes he wakes upside down
sometimes he never wakes at all
floating instead in the lost day
the lost year of spinning fans and solitary swims
on a beach where sand tangled
the waves smothered him
alive the way the wind cuts into his head
in the morning innocence drifts
and a curtain buries his body
enrapture and enrobe rapture
rapture and tell him his sins
heaven folded cold after the war
tell him his sins he sits on a dusty sofa
tell him his sins he follows a breath down the beach
as human he was born in cut hair
and broken chairs breakfast sausage
and baked beans a letter
an enlistment a signature
a mantel of silence
enrobing his twisted limbs