joseph_p_wood

O Amy you are the black gate at a wormhole’s entrance you are yelling

At Einstein to stop confusing everyone & he just pulls big white tufts of hair

That once yanked smell of cotton candy & Ferris wheels though like Jesus &

The fishes now carnies multiply & mutilate random cicadas & you grab my hand

Below the cosmos to a red atmosphere not blood-colored so much blood-thick

With phone wires so thin you’d think hamsters have acquired their own language

And thread & empty soup cans & bible scrolls of complaints how excruciating that water

Bottle always clogged never hinged right on the cage you say I can help your problems

And you take each animal out of the cage, roll them in your palm like Play-do, viola

A plush dinosaur with wings, a newly-minted preschool, some very lonely children

O Amy you are the many children struck paler than an ash tree back dropped

Against a wailing wall composed of seagulls still wailing the waves receding

In the late morning where Frisbees would fly if the entire beach weren’t a sea

Lion mating resort though this batch of blubbers can’t keep their erections

For weeks on end & Amy, I am just a mole upon your otherwise flawless shoulder

Save the fact you insist on hoisting the fat-flippered & flip them toward mates

so bored with this act & to finish you throw arms in the air beach balls fly

From the horizon line & now return those pale children floaties on their arms

You say we shall feed the lions & the children fresh lime jello & they will breath

Sunshine unlocked behind a gate where black has disappeared into its vast self

O Amy you are disappearing into a vast black only to teach me the sounds

Of the cosmos when I look up past the nuclear flower patterns missile strikes

Make a singed blue & yet seems so restful & you cup your hand into mine

Through the stratosphere of cloud & rain only to find the floor of another

Stratosphere of cloud & rain you say this was the astronaut’s suffering

Before their engines backfired & they joined the little exhaust puffs

Of light God makes to pass the time until every cuckoo clock on every planet

Stops & beheads its little bird & I say that doesn’t seem very nice capricious

On what goes & what stays God’s just an enormous Alzheimer’s patient

you say I got it wrong you say by our house’s gate is where I’ll find His head

O Amy you are a sherbet-colored head flaring beneath many less ice

Creams the angels can’t lick quick enough so the winged imps pout & pout

Until someone emerges from the darkest corner of heaven unbuckling

His belt asking anyone here have a problem like he was brandishing a pistol

Made of fire distilled into an army of quarks strapped with nuclear bombs

And you were the one who stood in front of God like a gate told him step

Back brother fucker you are one second from a lynching on earth’s last elm

Shame on you leaving the neurotic retina-burning circles of people’s lives

Strapped to a streamer thick as chain only hotter when the sun comes

Barging its way how do you like that Lord you say wildly waving a poker

O Amy you are the Lord & the poker you share in the afterlife & I

The cells of the earth sloughing like insect cuticles & your job is

To find a thousand parts of me & make me a man before the Lord

Burns down my last two plum trees in the house which is not a house

Since the mirrors were emptied of your face & the blankets no longer smell

Like your feet like the sea like sail boats parting a hundred horizon points

In a hundred places on earth & you are not Earth you are not cancer

Working its way down to the victim’s spine in a last ditch effort for him

To find his soul you only can open his ribs like a gate to his blackening

Heart & take your conflagration of purple party streamers & sing unto Him