I See That?

I once wanted someone to call me
a cacophonist, very badly
a temptress, somewhat ironically
a claw, without irony
a visitor

I visited Montgomery in a waking dream
no i-ching, dated street map
no derma, lacking raincoat
no gate, spearpoints, electricity
a fog in black suits

to keep me fresh, creamy, suitably bedded
nothing I could afford, a mitten
a stile stuck in time, a Beardsley
ambition to cow women, I awoke
with such a head

does a weasel lease his speeches to men?
is cuisine an art form? a batch
process, is that an art form too?
is any form a form of endurance, purged
of its obvious cemetery

a lover once broke my window, speaking
of me as a port, an age not to be
returned to. I felt good about it
tightening the tourniquet, growing
faint but alive.

habitué as white and remote as I, a bonus
in our social compact, his sock puppetry
shattered convention, I shared him
with a wallflower, Vicki Lester, the will
of a can of nitrocellulose and camphor

to survive, lure, fade, learn the abc’s in code
he was the more educable, but blue
when drawn from the creek bed, in two
shattered back, missing glasses
the cost of empathy, a copperhead

in his jacket sleeve. that can that contains
a glob of something acrid, rustlike
but dopey, acquitted, runs a small farm
producing glitter, proctor and gamble
fund him under the table.

I fell in love again recently, with antimony
thinking her a path to becoming, lead
blindfolded up the face, dark?
sides aching with pricks, naked
wet as the new chieftain.

She forced something into my mouth
an airborne tincture of blue, a toc
earmarked era’s end, the rampart
on an act of advancing, a reliction
I fell and slept. She incited

The Sepoy Mutiny.