Fourteen fish
bunched
like a silver
artichoke

They are traveling
farther
than their fathers

who never
left the river

Their futures
are
in lemons
and
bread crumbs

Inner core
Outer core
Mantle
Upper mantle
Crust
Susan.

Flora between her fingers,
Seeds between her toes.
Like Cinderella, I thought,
recalling an old "Wizard of Id" panel.

I stroll above the layers of the earth,
sing-songing under the tarp of heaven,
bulging with the weight of infinity.

Susan springs to her feet.
"Jesus Christ, a spider! Kill it!"
tangling her hair with
typewriter fingers.

I catch it on a leaf and
move it across the field.

I guess that makes me Mantle.

You took another picture of yourself today. It doesn't look much different than yesterday's. Or last week's. But as you flip back through the months and years, the difference is startling. The difference is harrowing.

You create an animated gif of every daily image of yourself captured over the last two years. A contemporary Dorian Gray morphs on your screen. The last image from today loops to the first image from two years ago. That moment, that blink of time, cracks your skull like a baseball bat.

You're out.

swallowed by the water flowers at last
the canoe breathed across the swamp
I found the roots of an ancient oak
felled by Paul Bunyan
shed on by the ox
and dove,
a dove falling into the light,
to the tree's top,
waving in the murky green,
strange fish like oxen
strange waters
strange trees
the dove and the ancient oak

A tattoo of a shadow remains when the light recedes.

Mock the sun, then, and ridicule the clouds. They've always seemed so stupid anyway.

Clouds. The poets can have them. They can have the clouds and the sun. Where are their clouds on a sunny day? And where's their sun on this overcast morning?

That's my shadow. I always have it. I don't need the weather -- just the steady hand of a artist.

Tattooed, herself.

We're not familiar with the same weather or same temperatures. I don't know the blazing heat of the desert. You've never felt the deep wet cold of the Atlantic states. And then there's the sun and the moon, and the underside of the asteroid grazing our comfort zone.

We could sing country songs in the backyard tonight. It'll be cold, but dry, and Venus is near the moon.

We'll begin at dusk. My dusk, your dusk, and the dusk of deserts, dusk of satellites. Hot dusk, chilling dusk.

Dusk, dusk.

The alligator with the cardboard mouth. The whipped cream on the stairs. Hollow clang. Syncopated clatter.

The brighter colors remind me of childhood. Not that adulthood has been faded yellows or softening greys. But a luminescent green or radiant orange triggers my primary nostalgia.

The set is bare. The slice of bread reads 5 in ketchup. A lazy harmonica.

When time runs out here, it starts over there. Follow the alligator king.

My word muscles are stiff. My writing bones ache. The prose reads like a bruise.

I burst bored air through my lips, upsetting the dust on my keyboard.

I see a tangerine, withered in the shadow of an orange, withering; dust on the hand sanitizer; a rubber band ball in a novelty stein; an orgy of paper clips; surrounded by colors, none too vivid, the only highlights are the highlighters.

The building I thought they were slowly constructing around me is being stripped as bare as a gazelle felled by a lion, shred by hyenas, cleaned by maggots.

I wasn't...

"Everyone is a sun," he insisted, but no one was arguing.

"Every dog has his drug," he affirmed, and they all agreed.

"He's an unusual kid," I decided, and they all agreed.

"Everyone is a sun," he repeated, adding, "but not you," and he pointed his peanut butter fist at me.

The sky was hazy and blue, like the sun in a balloon, and the road was cold and icy.

I uncoiled my hand-knit scarf and decided to wait for the moon.

But I call it "swing theory." It's sort of an uneducated, improvised explanation of how everything clicks. How one digs the atom. Why one gets so coo-coo for photons. What hip event is on the horizon.

It's crazy, baby. Quantum bums.