Freedom Must Surely Pay For This

torsion is your friend, you live in the same building.
you and torsion have lunch on alternate Tuesdays.
seems like those laughs will never end.

in the directory that lists the various serious
risks to the ear: the abrupt movement on your bedpost
of a mynah in a toga.

carpal tunnel from which no hand emerges. funny
or just sadly ironic? the hand without a surgical
flashlight implant. The darkness that falls on

cities with inappropriate names: Aleister
Crowley, Massachusetts. West Mt. Vernon,
Mississippi. Elvis Presley, Germany.

a light missing from a fist, young man on a tank,
idealist passing out xmas bonuses to the house
slaves. bread left blackening in the oven.

the book says all your countrymen could burst
something delicate in your canal. why so
circumspect? need the question repeated?

torsion is having your artwork appraised
for beer money. thinks William Demarest was our finest
tragedian. we need a new rooster, the old one

is crowing at passing fireflies. torsion got hired
as an underling for Arminians, women carrying
mangoes hidden between their breasts.

they only weep because they know someone died
for them. the crosstalk Newton took down verbatim
was junk from another space. Palagiana.

neither celebrity consists of morning, feathers
or the screed of a tin, enameled headdress. silver
birch, yellow birch, white birch. how many others

can be claimed? the skullsman collects his work
at dawn. listens for the rooster. peculiar, he thinks,
such a grandiose absence of a noise.

all Palagian women are deceitful by sixteen.
you can tell by the fang marks on their areolae.
the snakes will come in time, in time cum.

that at least is the Copenhagen interpretation.
a mynah sucking a hay seed, building a dormer
on his perch above the Wesleyan garden

of flightless mimetic savants. observing the lint storm
obliterating the eye. in the Balzac Sea, a small isle,
they laugh at the joke about to be told, the hundred

novels unwritten, illumined only by the gash,
where Newton’s second hand came loose and flew
one hundred and twenty feet, fracturing the raqiya.

the needy with an inordinate will, the desire
for a metal birdbath to heaven, can't find a seductive
bailiff to persuade their Vincent’s to sell.

Vincent’s Chrome Tomato. Vincent’s Candy
with Hidden Razor. A Gram of Opium, Unsigned,
Attributed to Vincent’s Nonexistent Student.

Gauguin’s Vincent Painting the Universal Clockworks
with a Crow Reciting the Planets’ Middle Names.
the White Birch are susceptible, die silently, at night,

black form on a branch. in Beltsville, Ohio they just clean up
with charcoal and the lit native of a strange land. the agent
of torsion debriefs herself in a diaphanous sheathe

entirely of live bees. she has a stinger not anyone could pull
off. the auctioneer crows, the mynah and rooster cum as one,
smoke under the table. everyone orders the Chicken Caesar.