—PLANET EARTH IS BLUE AND THERE’S NOTHING I CAN DO

                            Plastic Roses for a Buck

It’s a snuff film, where the streets play Russian Roulette with palsied trigger fingers. Or maybe it’s bald slaughter. Look around. Butterflies are giving half-priced hand jobs for their termite pimps. Swing your rope. The globe’s run out of catheter and that polygraph needle is stuck in my arm or throat. It’s hard for the mountains to resuscitate when everything is turgid and feeding on cordite. See if my tongue isn’t in foreclosure. My eyes on hiatus. My keratin on sabbatical. The ransom note reads like a riddle or poem meant to ridicule anyone who rolls away seasick. Lean in instead. There’s a speck of hope I can’t jigger free from the wad of gum stuck between these cellblocks. But before I leave, I want you to know I loved you more than space or time or mauve or tomorrow morning. I cared so much my bones abandoned me at a bus station where drivers self-combust. See me. I’m the one hanging on a nail, just below the flayed greyhound, both of us desiccated, our pores about to rust eternal.