Your mother has gone feral. Cleaning her hands with mint leaves after digging for earthworms among gravel. She quit driving after mentioning empathy for the deer that was caught in the crossing of a west heading road. The night she talked about that: the antlers, the halo, the grill of your car, which had been baline, got sharper, metal body becoming Deep Sea Angler machine. The backyard a ripped green dress she fenced herself whole nights in, thumbs regressed, and hips became bits that unhinged: she can scratch her ears, she can press her foot against the temple that her claiming mind has left. Your father sews his pincushion into her forest and that father your mind made as a patch enters that growing darkness, and sews a sawn-off through it, Orion and a scatter pattern of stars if Orion kept his belt unbuckled if on, if not on, on his knuckles, had a nice house, which is too, on its haunches, where you hang your shirts on question marks, the tags curling upward against the base of your neck like inflections. Don’t let them see us, don’t tell them what we are doing. We’re moving. We’ll do it at night, I’ve no idea what friends she’s been keeping. Until then you’ll have to abandon those rooms, you, as much a detective as any skinning knife or x-ray, a flashlight alive on a saw blade, circulate the basement, find no compelling evidence, so you move into the heat of the higher rooms, your belt and shoes falling beneath you, your bare toes seeming somewhat like leftover hooves, and you start to interrogate your toothbrush’s bristles and fang, all the sharp parts. Her closed bedroom, The ghosts of furniture. The kitchen, Stove top dinner plates brought into the delicacy, the holding cell of our dining room. The star witness hung and swimming above them, a luminescent jellyfish out from the darkest deep of the ocean seeped into the ceiling moulded by the drywall mud ball of the moon, petrifying your life into seizure’s crisis and flash, the birds into their flak jackets— on burnt days she’s found lounging under the porch sufficiently clothed in its shade. The loose fence board creaking in rhyme with the wind, a spider in a dandelion flame. You had a dog but something carried it away. Loose tenant that finds what you miss, Comes out of your kitchen, in your house a fish out of water with a line at the tip of his lips, sum up your relationship with a kid, monster and closet. Go to bed. Brush your teeth, well I hear laughter outside tonight, the mystery. You want to get along, you and that thin shirtless thing that dens in your guest room, your bathroom, while you cook and clean, you will look to me and turn out the light. Sweet wife, please, hold me in a low heat tonight.

Made of two yous that you used to take up rooms you used as new wombs. Two names that you used. You soothed the light from the window with motel sheets, soundproofed the ceilings, cleaned the hallways as rent paid, so we could stay with you, I can see. We cleaned our bodies that moved over you as the murders gone on of tenants we knew. Grotesque as the mobsters and monsters you left behind you. She was a tire in spin, The shape of an eye in front of the ocean, Digging for stones and throwing them against its window pane, Take it down dreamer, take it down deep, a sea swelled inside me for you, out of time, Ouroborous, the lizard claws at herself, an orbit a fall backward to blame, I was buried in my personal history and the underground parking garage, I know only the wrecking rock the body became. Here my body will rise to the penthouse, Dodging hobo's and cyclists, Like elevators and the scent Of cheap wine. The window is open. The cool breeze. I squeeze myself when I'm sleeping. Freeze me, Please keep me in season, I am time's surveyor of this lady's layers. She was a first floor lower life form, she felt so warm, when they put you in the earth it was a dirty reverse of our hellos. I spent all my time on the fourth floor, now I can't make another move. Some of this is an armature, and some of it's just a ruse. Lets drive in. Lets drive out 'til we can't see no vacancy, and I can't make another move. The car's exhaust is our mutual fossils. I want to make a move. I watch the fan blades drifting back in their spin to become the defence of dorsal fin plates on a stegosaurus. I am up here, above it, down there, watching the cars rush like rodents, dreaming of their carbon offset. I want it back, and will climb to the earth. Your lady says no. Your lady says no. Your lady says no, well she said no until you get all the way back home. All this time it was everything inside me, crawling out into a garbage disposal All this time it was everything inside me just crawling out into a garbage disposal. I'm a dirty word that's oiled in the hinge, it's mumbling it as the door opens into your six by two coffin, Whatever you are in we're in. Tell it to me slowly. Tell you what? Id really like to know if that time there were reasons you loved me? I will eat you alive! I'm on the windowsill, I'm on the fourth floor. I'm on the windowsill, laying the compost. I'm on the windowsill, I'm on the fourth floor. I'm on the windowsill, laying the compost. I'm on the windowsill, I'm on the fourth floor. I'm on the windowsill, laying the compost.

All strung out on toast and jam all strung out on toast and jam all Strung out on Toast and jam all strung out on Toast and jam. We will speak of our years open as crystals, a prism shining through light from the shutter. There was prohibition, new dances, and the advent of modern movie magic. The riots, the smugglers, rum runners, the familiar beat of their bone-bending wheels on our cobbled street dropping parcels, we could dance or we could sleep to that rhythm. Men were better then, people said, clean shaven and up. Your lover a person that you loved. We were drunk on the musician’s breath between notes, me on your space between kneecap and hip, that little street of the body, and your jazz music. The trip into the city, which you loved and missed. The train like us, had its gravity, an attraction you followed and fell into like the beds of our husband’s best friends. It moved in space, and left it between itself and the tunnel wall. The ember of moon moves forward into the tube of its eclipse. Hands, holding cigarettes, come out of the gutters. Women wear feathers, men thin moustaches they could have drawn on but for their dimension. Sweating the lip-stick off of their skin. Darling, keep your teeth in while I’m telling the story. The animals are waiting for God the animals are waiting for God the animals are waiting for God the animals are waiting for God

Work starts off at ten o’clock with me and two women named Brenda and I started off here in autumn, the sweat of my Septembers here three years since. I couldn’t count the hours. Days spent flicking coins into a register with spurts of precision or piling donations in a stratigraphic profile of trash bags. Much is un-returnable and also like time waged in earth, words come in these piles, it must be this which was written there or rose up like something subconscious in a customer’s mention of the weather here at Talize, the vortex at the sentence end of a period. We work in two sections, the one I’m not in called Production. They sort donations, sifting the artefacts of other families, separating the junk, crap, sellable from the celebrated stuff we get out of here and into a dumpster. They work at the back, and the break-room is close to that, as if my minutes away moved, direct with intention, nearing that backdoor’s new year, come here and sit for fifteen minutes with me, facing the wall, as I consider everything I’ve rejected.

Clean up, get still. Get ready. That hurricane heart of hers is coming. You don’t know who named her but that vast media ocean, or that salt ocean, where she’s stirring with the name of a girl. The sound of that whirlpool flirting with song before you, prior to you,as if her own back- story. On the way to the hospital I thought a left signal was a nebula blinking blots of dark over the moon-shine, the highway hyphened its lines spinning too fast. Yes. Yes spinning too fast. I love the scent of a hospital. It makes me feel like I’m crawling backinto that pre-natal state assigned state of mind. The flood a mother drug they try to take back their names from. All this time I spent in a green room, the window’s light bruising the wall to blue. Before the flood comes, and the world walks in, I’ll kill him dead if I have to. I guess that I should get going. Tell my mother I did all I could. The water opening his mind to wider than surgeons can sew. Well I want to say, Want to say that I love you. I can’t say, I can’t say that I love you. You know I want to say want to say that I love you. I can’t say, I can’t say that I love you. You know that it’s too late, so I’ll stay, the water rising like an awful pulse instead of the pulse turning like a highway. I will say till I can’t be trusted anymore. After the flood we lined bodies up on the ground. Come back to atrophy house, read dust like eyeshadow on the plywood of boarded up windows, seaweed dangling like Christmas lights from the rain-trough. Imagine you, before it all, under that light bulb that is, if you’ll believe it, still there,whole as an inverted skull glued to the ceiling. Flies, since or prior, have died in the light cover, propped in the corner,animals have made their homes here and that’s admirable. Turning it on, the knotted bulb at the end of the pull string responds, breaking the bulb and the knot of it filament— I feel dumb here, watching a bedroom mirror’s ripple reflect the blast radius of a boshane skull in this placid frame like a straw swivelling in the stirred drink of the rabid anatomist, to whom your head’s a grenade.

Static shoulders are of my arms soldiers knows the dirt’s a dead farm. All our games are over, been like that since 1919 October. And I find I can’t understand or take any more, any more of the pressure that’s all mounting up all these times that I find that this is all over She took a freight train to her grandma’s house I’m a wolf in a suit there let me out I’ll go down on all fours, crawl under the bed and whimper, shed my fur, send me to theatre I can hear him say— "these hands are caves." Welcome to the “Lupine Theatre Show” you’ll be the feature. Gather round children, the shows about to start. And I find that I am again a doorman trying not to let them through I am in front of you, spectral in screen-light I will make you part of my geology. When I put you in the ground you’ll see.

Comrade we’re wading through the windowpane, glass breaking in slow motion as they throw us over, the street below is subtitled “soldier”, in between the air is our orders, comrade. I got enlisted in this espionage by my pinup ex-wife firing her breasts off like a barrage of wedding corsages, you realize to be a spy is to always be in disguise. When the bomb’s peck rattles her door she’ll think it’s me walking, wanting more, I left her without a dollar or word, my falling fingers have turned into birds. It’s a cold war so you better get by on your frigid wits, Be the kind to leave no evidence. When my uncle enlisted, full of wishing and risk articulate in a flight journal, his brother kept an album of aircraft which mimicked that list, the pilot, twenty seven and dead to those red Russians, flying a bat, Bristol Bolingbroke, variant of the British Blenheim— you will go blind at night, the snow, crossed gas lines as he falls over you and his life like a chronicle in cursive fuel tubes.His brother becoming subsequently better at throwing knives at the floor. The body having been a pilot light all its life. His apparition, that night, forming in the kitchen, do it over again, go back to the beginning, his noise in a darkening alleyway. Listen, I know your head’s red weather, I’ve really just got hired, Its all political, I’m going to retire, I’ll stop taking girls to the movies, I don’t know anything Don’t throw me out there, Ill float slow as an ambassador In this lonely place, Stalingrad. Comrade, comrade, comrade, c’mon comrade! We are your friends, You’ll never be alone again Well c’mon, Well c’mon, Well c’mon, well c’mon We are your friends, You’ll never be alone again Well c’mon, Well c’mon, Well c’mon, well c’mon You wake up and feel like your heater, my friend, my agent, my lawyer: binding your umbrella tight you move and look like a hundred mice in a human costume. Weightless in the wind’s witch on a winch above “the Russian,” I’d been that neighbourhood cat dodging traffic in this picturesque city’s classified district with “the Russian’s” hot batch of cold war rumbling an arm and a half’s reach behind me in the film’s climactic end sequence. I caught the rope, pulling the slack after, began to scale this building as if the tables had turned in interrogation, the bead of sweat returns to the scalp’s rendezvous, and I hoped for a billet out of frame before I realized my hair is gelled this perfectly so as to simulate gravity, and I’m straight, the camera is tipped on its side. My last flic had me a drug addict and I’m still a bit riddled, svelte like a spy, but the truth is my arms are thin enough to be beautiful women and “the Russian” is actually a mean Brit I stole a kiss from last minute. His moustache tickled. the wind carrying his code phrase across the building’s sheer drop I could walk off, “you’re not the hottest bitch in Hollywood”. It was a miracle the morning didn’t break without an “I’m not falling, I’m not falling away,’ I liked the movie last night honey its funny that I’m not afraid yet. The title of the week is women and their fucking fantasies. I’m not the hero you don’t get to be such a negotiator, I’m not the only liar that you’ve ever fell backwards into. This much, this much is just a moment, don’t say, don’t say last night was just for my enjoyment. I’m the one here that’s really falling. Comrade, comrade, do you mind If I, if I call you that the last time we fall together, before I fall out.