There’ll be no town-going today;
I’ll be wind-rattled and listen
to the window’s answering racket.
I’ll watch flies manifest from glass
then rub the rust and sadness off.
I’ll have my lapses into slapsticks
of accent and stutter, girl and mother.
Flies will spin a crown of woozy cartoon
stars for me.
I’ll roll my eyes back, thinking;
I’ll be the picture of flightiness today.
Assumptions will spill from my ears–
a brain storming out in furious herds;
all summer my brain will be a pasture
of tall, hissing grass, a sibilance intent on
rising to character air.

 

Fly forgeries of z wallpaper in my room: chainsaws, prop planes, wind forcing itself through. It’s a fact that the skull makes room for the brain by talking; the brain shakes like a curse in the cranium as something dark crawls out of my mouth. The radio is pouring weather I must knit into a shawl. Evenings require a shawl and the wrong love, the wrong noise of one’s wrong thinking. Flies come into the brain every last inkling into swarm, into arias of amnesia and treble thoughts. No one can shoot something that small.

 

I will just shoot off today; I’ll just
blurt out argot in the rawest haze.
Today I’ll be snoring at the kitchen table
while the radio slips into passing traffic.
I will be sworn by. I’ll be clairvoyant
by keeping half in the dark. I’ll know
apropos out-posts by staying home today;
by haunting my own enlarged attic
under worried clocks drum-humming
me down to make me one of their
vernaculars–believe me,
black hole, you bright microscopia,
you know best how long I’ll stand
stitching up grass-stained synapses
in devotion to invisible demands, whatever
the invisibles demand.