While two-stepping poorly in the hallway

A telephone I’d assumed was broken trembled.

The next morning I could still see it ringing,

Softly. On the other end of the line was a lion waiting to lick my bones, softly.

Some may say that the letter L can lift a half empty cup of tea,

But I’ve only ever seen one man in an expensive hat

Empty his coffee cup just by lowering his spectacles.

A giant zucchini

And a painter have set fire to my genius brain

And now I only want to taste at the back of my palate

The uninvited monotony

Of Mutual of Omaha dumbwaiters, Marlboros and rent checks.

You might find me singing on the stairway or in the lobby of your building, love.

Mine is a state of infinite palsy-walsy-ness,

Full of the baths and the showers we take together

And when Tom bangs his knees on the doormat in front of the hairdressers

And contract killers with poor vision

Come riding up stoked on crystal meth

You will see that my suspenders still overlap my blue blouse.

Add these things together on the side of an aluminum hospital wall

And it is not the names of trees but of colonists

That will lay down on your tongue. Sleepily turn them over.

Where do gigantic naiads get off

Trying to look like a woman walking into a room to see herself in a mirror?

Their watery necks, covered in pancake, are still blue;

Between their thighs of red and green

Dangle a million rooms

Where every green wave finds its coffin.

My tea cup was broken by a rock thrown anonymously

As I marched past in the parade of playing cards. My tea cup

Was memorialized almost immediately in a giant block of ice sculpted with a blow dryer—so large you could

Pour the entirety of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool into it and there’d still be room for the tea!

Shoe sales scientists and tax form handlers

Of the Ganges, in the firmament

The litterbug makes his way across the backs of the paychecks

Of comic book heroes, bakers and baseball stars.

Architect of the Staten Island Ferry’s dining area,

I made, at the lip of a volcano,

With a pig who digs for cherry pits,

A passage for an ocean class garbage barge

And now, here to hoot my horn, is the mother of the color of the night.

Her wheat makes love to both genders with wide-eyed clarity.

The rain runs down the inside of her thigh to kiss her foot

As she dances in her stockings in a men’s bathroom stall without shame.

Dry star of millionaires, voided clothes

Of the desolate, a letter fell at the foot of the sales lady

Illuminating her large toeless pumps

That few had seen shine personally.

The witness to the movements of Virginia’s rivers

Was planning a hideous and wicked new voting booth

With hot oil pouring on your nose, and lazer rays re-melting your crown

And sea birds nesting silently in your hair.

Upon finding my eyes full of flames again

I saw the horror of my toadies

And smelled, upon re-entering my donkey,

The point of marauders’ saucy remarks.

The pendulum swinging over the funeral of non-native speakers of English

Sung out brutally at noon,

And the sky sent down its arms

To the saddened Earth, filled with gourds.