Here’s a turnip from the garden
near the brook, or, to be accurate,
two tomatoes from the market.
I’m confused by the correspondence
of their forms. I believe physicians
have a name for the condition.
Not mine. She shows me drawings
of spiders and asks, Are these sketches
the inspiration for the webs
under your eyes or are your eyes
the source for all the silk in China?
Well, yes and no. What they show
is wayward—a recipe that frees
gorse from gorp. Today, bored
of five digits on one hand
and incriminating fingerprints
on the left, I decide to dumb down
the skyline’s blocks of gutless planes.
I wish to embue each impotent
edifice with the shrapnel
of emoting that comes from bombings
or pilgrimages to a seaside chapel.
Each time I end up whaling.
Today’s practitionerrs use
computers to deadeye a pod
a thousand miles away. In turn,
the church owes a great deal
to the sway of baleen rain-chutes
over their great roofs in the guise
of extrapolative bull’s balls.
To harpoon with sonar and TNT
one must be one with occasion
and far more than, simply, a bald
head bowed into the immediacy
of a doodle. My doctor believes
in a world like a waiting room
whose magazines are decades
out of date and the receptionist
isn’t sure that your HMO is
on her list and yet in the midst
of that slog and gloom mending
breeds between two humans
in an utterly inapt manner—
like a hand of one-man checkers.
To transmit such hokum into
action demands occlusion
or pillarization as well
as occasion, or, in my case
a special trek to a chapel
in Houston and a night at sea,
irrelevant to design, praying
to be deep-sixed by sea monsters.
I earned it. But I can breathe under-
water so don’t bubble for me.
Instead, invest in angles, develop
friendships and associations with
a mob of chic nouns. One of us
deserves to come into view
from the blend and provide for
the odd profiles. I choose you.
