the bleak parakeet dancing
in the cage, the spores multiplying
with mocking smiles. This isn’t
a dream.
This is a cross reference
in my brain, something a little Valium
will extract. I constantly see things
this way,
dark and dangled, cankerous
and pustular. It is the repetition. It must be.
After all, when I was five
the world
looked green from behind my handlebars.
Later, I dated a girl with wonderful ankles.
I drew favorable analogies.
Alas,
I was an optimist before I saw dustbins
fill with decomposed corpuscles, tumefaction
break the bone,
shrivel
the skin, a gasping plasmodium
wrinkle in bed. All this senselessness—
and then again, and again.