They Too Are Starfish

You are punching the lights out of tiny skulls

and replacing them with amusement as to

why we read. Piece the toaster back together,

I respond to sound. Again, you are punching

what is "well" and piecing it back together

as "the best I can do." But "the best you can do"

is, "well," a lot of it is crap. I know there are

better words, like "prophet" and "pike" and

"kick-ass" but, to be honest, the Dalai Lama is

visiting and I don't have the floor, prick or

gumption to tell him that this page is far

too uncomfortable or that the hole in your

chest is too far gone. I made this up at the

Algonquin Hotel for the Badly Shot Up,

the proceeds will go to new ideas and to

the house band. Remember that just past the

guilt-edged matrix of seeing is a vast cast-

off god, taller and more genuine than any

yeast yearning to see the association of

childhood sexual abuse and the wings I've

sprouted into my belly like a cork or a

language poem. Washington ties its self

to one gate and Natalie Merchant to another.

This is automatically seen as the denaturing

of nature, as if Dallas and Chris Tyndall both

spoke so slowly that you could be in the

countrified air of Austin or in a fortified bunker

2,000 miles below the earth's surface in

Saskatchewan perfectly tricking the equation

into thinking that it solved the problem and

that the toaster is actually a flower that can

say something meaningful. Perhaps it's just

the choir preaching to the choir boy, but it

pisses me off! Because when I get up in the

"morning" it's not really a strange, fluttering

machine shop complicated by the dense

and meaningless cries of the wreckage. No.

Coherence needs a human element. Your

eyes are wide open your mouth and you

laugh "This virus is MINE!" and this snow-

cricket and this coaxial wire and this hope

that the screws in your thumb are not the

rule but the hummingbird for articulating

what many of us think. What we think is

that the brain is as dangerous and irresistible

as the briar patch and that at the center of that

patch is the fear of death. The hinge is the

line break, patches overlapping their attempt

to make us "see" the ghost instead of the

furniture inexplicably moving.