A horse snorting wildly at the slightest slither;
we are natural enemies, ankle-biting snake against
fetishized freedom, all hair.  You pepper-eating poets
seduce me every time.  Against my character, might

I add: My nostrils are as dilated
as they've ever been, to detect the slightest hint
of movement from you, a stirring and then
the anatomy of the thing will emerge.

Laundry List: Please buy
Tide, the catalogue of the human soul,
self-cutting.  You might crumple up the writing
and swallow it like a spy,

but burning toast is no career, my friend.  Perhaps
that bitch poetry is a necrophiliac, never letting dead
archetypes sleep.  Yes, I know that Helen has launched
ships from: Vietnam, world wars, the Midwest,

which is landlocked.  But you cannot kill the
fat-fingered fairies, the delicate forms.  Rapunzel,
Rapunzel, let down your standards!  I will give you
a dose of your own medicine, and like a cancer

the poem will grow and swell, and the entrance fee is:
matted dog fur, stillborn niggers, pickled torsos in the bath.
But let us discuss the many ways in which humans
hurt.  Cuts, burns, scorned loves, shocks to systems heavy with

pathogens.  Your mother.  That vase.  I am in your
thrall, pepper-eaters, with all trimming and none of the -
what do I care?  Unrealized possibilities are the most
seductive thing there is, and it's interesting

when people scream and strip and die.  Particularly
in one so young, and all the high ideals in the Dakotas
don't stop burnt toast - like unrequited love, the intention
is to feed: and it is small, silver, hard, but it chars.  The stink

on your hands and in your hair.  Windows opened,
curtains flung, wars won.  A blackening of purpose
and then an absence of sound:
and in the morning, it's still there.