My aunt always made butter for the peasants. My aunt always bought a chocolate cake when we came to visit, and was always scared we'd drop it on her thick carpet. Her husband was bald, you see. He didn't, for he was blind. To everything except his car, and a pert young secretary called Bert. Short for Berticelli. Any cherubim is a cherubmine. Something worth digging for. A vast warehouse, aircraft carrier kind of place, filled with pale light, and the gentlest creatures you ever saw left as a bloody mess in a parking lot. But not now. Now they're flutterfloatdriftteasing towards us.

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Dreams the horse-maiden whose hair now flows from the turret into the mouth of my mother who died in a bubblebath, of dandelions in denim robes and sea-lions and cup-purple sofas sown by the desert-builder of gottenlooky who stares year upon year from his garden trellis.

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To say that your pals like this country would be to exceed the limits of poetic license. And all their future lovers, tethered outside like moonbeams. Flat gravestones and assembly-line funerals, blindfolded by passion, dappled by his urine, softened by a rainless autumn. a cache of metal parts and artifacts of largesse. cinching her waist, the pain of anticipation. flying with antlers on display. gliding into the aperture. seeing light where the flood receded.

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The sudden complexity of a tongue. In tiny groups, rocks re-assemble.

oh bloody mammoth you got rabies from flushing toilets in a neighbor's pyjamas dunces drive card of lead-pudding chauffeur, but jinx of fratboys falling headburst on concrete, now hot for an instant. My last nose got pregnant, it was aborted into space like a prude on rollerskates. have you ever risked everything? of course not! brian appleseed played games with his mother that made her skirt twitch as she hung from the rafter. the island was quieter after that, and the boss was attached to a lump of keys bigger than floridas. florida is a good woman and will meat a boiled ex in the morning. the baby just needs to be loved and is far from a warrior. thus flowers and spaghetti and getting from a to b. scurrilous mice eat treacle in a parking lot filled with lips. each can be entered and will lead to a different climate. I prefer the tropical rainforest one, but sometime the desert hits the spot. I like big suns. and so does debbie, she of the fur-lined pram who's kid is studying to be a window-cleaner. the middle class makes me want to vomit, like all vulgar foods. hairpin bends in a shoe box. santa behind a willow tree. weasels in the attic. hundreds of ribbons tied to a hog. quick exit fireman to brazil, shakey mine-prop for a doorknob where pete makes his miniature-sized versions of days and weeks. he's saving up for a year. lord of harmonica-sucking, and rarely seen without Gallant Sue, the tigress giantess on whose back he is transported to the foodstore at odd times of the day, for the purchse of plantains, from the skins of which she has made curtains for her room as well as an ampitheater which is the envy of a hard day strike-breaking.

..........................................................................................................................................................................syrupy liquid creeps into all the furniture. ladders pray.

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my grandmother was a fine woman. from a distance you could hardly see her.

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eggshells in heaven, reminding us of other sartorial choices, like bloomers before the first frost. 1963. rising falls, idaho. eyes ago, i dunno. lockheed disaster

where orphans feed upon false buttresses. pond-woman and trees of kool-aid. an old joke

by the lip of a zoo.

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any conk of yours is a concubine.

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the most vigilant blood relatives filtered through a soft sieve, a rear-end precision, a flagrancy, a plaything of giant skymonkeys, a kin of lungships, scouring iron rod every bustiere for a fleck of dog saliva or other precious metal, dying to be flaggelated slowly, living for that once-a-month opportunity that leaves it's prow untouched, not rumpled like mare's teeth or revived by tax-collectors. he leaves his dad alone for a change, huddled in khaki and cardboard, not caring about food or effigies, licking the carpet in case the soldiers haven't already come through, a taste of snot or treacle wafting abroad.

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Prison tattoos or pension plans. or both, it's all just haggling over the price.

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