When I Look Outside My Window I Can’t Get No Peace of Mind

Demise might not happen today what do I see
    a large woman walking with two canes a striation
of exhaust fluid pooling in a left-over rain puddle
    from a downpour this morning that I watched

intently from my windowsill while eating a yogurt
    Believe everything is actually working against you
because it is regardless of how much lipstick
    you put on or whether or not the new deodorant

actually responds to stress as advertised which
    by the way it does not but If it’s possible the mouth
might still be sexy after grease spurts out of a burrito
    on the last bite we may be in the business of

    a survivable universe or at least a tolerable one
    which before it kills us makes us visible

• • •

Fat Dream with Blue Whale

We are gliding                        alongside each other in the North Atlantic ocean,
weightlessly                            propelling forward in the freezing water. I am as
immense as you                     are, reveling in the length and breadth of our imperfect
barnacled bodies,                  giant as we are graceful. It’s as if the entire sea is
a reverent                                procession for our massiveness. I am learning from you;
mimicking your                     precise dorsal fin inflections, following your dive
instinctively,                           plunging effortlessly into blacker, colder depths and then
swimming back                      up toward the light. I hear a slow, deep beat, as if from a
huge hollow drum,                emanate from somewhere inside you—first a short one,
then a much longer               one—a haunted bellow I can feel in my bones: you are
telling me we must                breach before eating. Seamlessly we break the surface of
the water without                  much of a splash, two parallel slivers of moon ascending
from beneath.                         A rush of oxygen blasts our blood as we let air into our
lungs, filling us                       with the energy we need to lunge headlong and fast into

the swarm of                           glowing krill ahead of us. I watch you open your jaws to
nearly a 90° angle,                 and I tilt my head back to do the same. My mouth splits
itself open like                        a massive mollusk in preparation for the feed. I am
startled when                          instead of teeth I feel long curtains of rough baleen
attached to my jaw.               We thrust into the luminous cloud of food, mouths agape,
sucking in every-                    thing we can fit inside us, gallons of seawater and billions
of krill swishing                      inside the cathedrals of our cheeks. Before I can allow
myself to swallow,                  I purge the excess ocean back out of my mouth with my
tongue, trapping                    only the desirable food in my baleen filter. There is such
implicit purpose in                this ritual. We the collosals, our hearts so big a person
could swim through              our arteries, thick walls of warm blubber padding the
enormity of our                      bodies. Nothing as large as we are has ever lived in this
world. The power                   of that immensity is an understanding between us, a quiet
knowledge that                       our size is our life force, and with it we rule these seas.