We hurl ourselves over
      then over again
into the wall

All I can offer you now is weathered—
this face, these hands. I've lived too long underground.
My eyes cannot fix on the distance

1. A mother’s lifelong rage. The slow burn
of a wire behind an old house wall, its paper
ornamental to the last, going

Eugene would say, "Someone died . Time to redecorate."
Everything we owned was secondhand.
We needed to move. We were running out of space.

Neck pulled back. Wrists tied. Weight pops
shoulder from socket. All disjunction.
So many Judgment Days. Hell absorbs us

After the curistes are all evacuated, from my balcony.
I watch the hotel next door bum down.

Water. Man. The fire burns all night.

I think I know what he would say
about the dream I had last night
in which my nose was lopped off in a sword fight,

It’s a story as famous as the three little pigs:
one evening a man says he is going out for cigarettes,
closes the door behind him and is never heard from again,

I wish my head to appear perfectly round 
and since the canvas should be of epic dimensions, 
please trace the circle with a frisbee, 

As far as mental anguish goes,
the old painters were no fools.
They understood how the mind,