it lay in my palm soft and trembled
as a new bird and i thought about
authority and how it always insisted

When I was a young man
chasing girls I was so
hot to get into them I

So I’ll speak ill of the dead. A was crooked,
planting the small left finger of the raccoon in the upholstery
before he sold the car. B made certain to point out Celia’s

Gentlest hull of bond, tendons that bear
to work a gait, sentiment that brought you here:
at the window in the dark, speaking tongues

What he had said came back to him.
Sectioned seat, sectioned seat.
The lift caught wind and swayed him in.

I wanted the gigando set in this corner here,
the 36 incher under the row of cornapples
hung just as the greasy greasy grannies done.

The sea’s tedious soliloquies
drone and repeat
against the rinky-dink dock

Old wolf, I said,
leave a tatter
for my family:

In old movies they searched the mummy’s tomb
with flashlights, on tiptoe—as if the dead
were listening, numbered the catacombs

Like sandbox toys abandoned in mid-play
when mothers finally call the children home,
cars, trucks, and tanks lie strewn along the highway,