He lived in a smelly castle, where everyone’s mother

Had bad skin. One of them, they say, lived behind glass.

An open tin of cough drops arrived from the Orient one day,

And thereafter the master plumber grimaced and reached into the crevices between his teeth.

In an empty house are several empty closets

Full of the smell of the barn, dusky and dank,

Where sometimes one might find an old flask made in Russia

Jumping around with all the life of a donkey having just woken up

A thousand miles from its barn door. Butterflies at the funeral

Serve fruity drinks quietly in the hospital wing

While the superintendent interrupts a conversation between a sick patient and the President’s nurse,

Her nails painted turquoise, her lips red, her eyelashes gold.

Here’s something that will leave you shocked and electrified,

Swirling in a whirlwind: The nurse’s eyes closed at the edge of a cliff

And there she pushed the donkey to his end with both hands,

Onto a secret golf course hidden behind a swamp of human remains.

It was on the terrasse of the club house of that secluded golf course

That Lazarus smelled his laundry in the dryer, fresh on the wind.

He woke one morning to find the ghost of his caddie dancing forth from his icebox

In a beat-up old golf cart, but lovely, with “Just Married” written on the back.

Isn’t it always the way, that when I know I’m lost in a coat closet

With several other men, with several evil-looking handguns in my change purse,

That that’s when they want to throw me out and beat me in the head with a sad bottle,

Leaving me decrepit, dusty, for sale, abject, with goose eyes, tripped up like a soccer player

—Which is how I know I’ve been down this road before, lovable blackflies!

The sour lemon in your voice and in your diseased sex

Is a talentless poison prepared by angels! The liquor

That ranges through me, reddening my cheeks, it’s the beginning of the short morning that sets me barking!