looking out of small dusty windows for mexican wrestlers, those men that work the funeral pyres, Dr. Gunther von Hagens, men who can mesmerize cobras, command falcons and control cranky camels; my dead relatives who came across the country in covered wagons and the indians who killed three of them; contortionists, cerebral fractal freaks- people who have seen dead bodies in glaciers, intact as the day they were swallowed by ice; all those who have risen up from oppression and suffering and have walked into light.

i live in a town now that is populated by old fat ladies who by day, place little brightly colored yellow and turquise song birds in cages outside of lonely single apartment dwellings that smell of yesterdays thoughts and spiteful semen to catch the breeze that wafts across the placid lake that patiently accepts the sewage water from the town that collects at the bottom and maliciously bubbles to the top where it is released in vapors that supress the songs of the little birds sitting outside in cages. at night, roving bands of misinformed miscreants travel with surplus gasoline and if the moon reflects across the lake in such a way- they'll smash the window of a car and torch it right there- i can sit on the dusty porch and watch the flames grow higher and higher. here where i live by the lake.

totenwogel

he said it died for the thirst of sugar water so he encased this broken bird in a cardboard tube and filled the shameful coffin with pure salt and left it on the cluttered counter after sealing it shut with common dirt brown masking tape.

the world is cruel and you are made frail by dust in your eyes stirred up by the digging of the mass graves in Poland, 1939. your vitality is taken as you and 20 million other chinese starve from famine in 1969. the nuclear winds that blow above and seep into the ground of russia in 1986 gnaw at your bone marrow. your home is shattered in 1993 when the ground under india shakes 22,000 people into death. is this you they pull from under the rubble caused by the bombing of the nairobi embassy in 1998? and there you are again- being battered by the tornado winds that raced along upward of 300 miles per hour in oklahoma,1999. all you can do is turn your eyes away and look straight into the face of compassion.

i can sit at the table and be polite and act curious while keeping one eye firmly planted on the dirty ceiling that conceals the wide jagged night sky and see past all of the indifference for what really intrigues me is not love but rather the length of the cat as it slinks round the corner looking longer than stripes should reach and the lilt of my lonely leg slipping away to take comfort in this mental onanism which grows more refined than the crystalline salt he pours over the wetness of my joy.

and in this place where the tracks ran through said the meekest of us that all grace had laid down as if by waste and the breeze sang by bundled all up in a bye and bye that was anything but sublime.