The fact that I am writing in the background

of day should offer a notch of cool comfort

about or without me, my graveyard on ice.  I tend

to camouflage acrobatics of finely-grained stutters

by sitting perfectly motionless.  Passers by speculate

in rounds on my rowboated entrance:  through onlooker

swallows and necks of picket fences, guppy mirrors

and ancient mailmen puncture the life of the body. 

What is a real story without a spoiler?  In the next

room, fist-squeezed juice and just-right toast turn

recurring themes in my work.  I’m often found

napping in the backyard of youth’s shelter, lying

on grandma’s gladiola bed.  She’d rather this scene

than actually to kill me.  Sometimes winter

was the closest I came to silence:  my car sits

stalled in her laundry room basket.  Habitually,

I mismanage the stress of my small jaw

almost as much as the money she left.  An inner

voice tells her misquoted ear to back off

from critics since I am a fun loving lady

eagerly slicing bread into squares 

of handwritten text.  Muddied roses, I remain

a lump of failing meat.  I measure the thorns

it takes to dance over days while praying

buttermilk curdle in edges.  Without a cause,

payback branches cut into news of tsunamis

and late-breaking terrorists.  How can the metallic

hour become our wine-red stand-off proving

we held center-stage in the crosshairs of films

that sell us together, drinking and sewing

characters of tinfoil, hacking limb for limb

baited links to the delicate lace of our foregone

planet?  We straddle no longer talc within

a captor’s lens of grave proximity;

we abandon powdered restraint.  We turn to

stony nectar of silent sugars chained & fermenting. 

Everyone knows we’ll come to a cubed-vision

past that we’ve long since distilled in brackets.