Somebody opened the book of lies,
soporific, Nobody's family
album--not so much a tree as a stinging
rhizome, pink & serrated & ululating
upon the oily waves; the poison cloud
wafts from the broken spine, a rat
king of question marks that drops,
feral, to the dusty ground, digs down
deep toward the glutinous buried bones--
nothing stays down there
for long. A purple gas mask, the emblem
of the home town necropolis,
the old necropolitan cheer the chuff of
a puffball through a bone comb buried
under an Ocean State Job Lot; the dead
might change the channel on the TV set
but there's nothing on. If you could call it
dying, if you could at least mind meld
one stranger before the going, it might
be better, a leaden weight made to feel
less heavy, closer to subhuman, at least,
the stink of fear & sweat something
to remind you of the plot you've
barely paid off as your oily
foreheads touch. On an old man's
fontanelle, a paper crown stapled together
from one of many misbegotten
sonnet sequences, the rest never published
& long forgotten, filed away in a drawer
his children will never open, his hovel
a toxic vapor of cat litter & TV dinners.
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