Stepping deftly to the jetty,
members of the boating party,
women in pearls, long skirts, cloche hats,

Unable to distinguish between flying and falling
With a feeling of splendid contempt and with a strange loving longing 
In my eyes, I look up at the helicopter that was lately  my home 

Once upon a time
in the village of Stara
Zagora, Mikhail Drogzenovich,

I am about to close my refrigerator after removing a package of meat when I hear my door lock turning and a crew of men, without so much as first knocking, walk in.

Because there are things we don’t understand, we’re shaking
our heads no. But still there are acupuncture needles,
mysterious as Excalibur, in a numb chest,

Thomas Bottle was thinking of all the things he hated: hair down his back when he got a haircut; his Aunt Fern’s kitty litter; ringworm; the loud women in baseball caps who came every summer to paint the ocean below his house; and Jehovah’s Witnesses who came to sell him Awake! and The Watchtower. 

It begins in the back of the head,
gathering force like the strangler’s
mop in Slam sweeping across the floor.

None of the townspeople raise their voice for, naturally, they make up the bulk of the payroll.

The country was therefore sealed off, all foreigners were expelled, and the cities were emptied.

‘Today, I finally met God’, he says as he enters the Oracle’s alleged chamber