★ Broadcasting rules dictate that you won’t see my dead body ★ not the right leg coddling the face ★ not the left eye slung‐shot from the head ★ lying like a squashed date in the sand ★ If you lose an eye ★ you lose only one‐fifth of your vision but all of your sense of death ★ I mean depth ★ Fuck it ★ The goddamn medivac never drives fast enough ★ And the flak jacket only attracts attention ★ That’s what wife said the last time we talked ★ So for god’s sake don’t wear it ★ Well it wasn’t anybody’s fault I wasn’t on TV ★ The ten pints of blood took twenty minutes to leave me ★ No one can hold a selfie that long ★

★ My jaw’s broken ★ My skull holds three bullets ★ My buddy keeps one of my toenails because it got blown into his cheek ★ And nobody seems to mind that I wear wife’s garter around my testes ★ I have nothing to do but lay here and look ★ out at that desert there ★ It’s like a pasture ★ part past and part future ★ there’s no present that’s not in the looking ★ or the looking after ★

★ I am now one inch square in the obituary ★ surrounded by the reality it does and doesn’t refer to ★ Against biography there are the children I had ★ fighting the children in my imagination ★ Then suddenly there’s my body creamed in a ditch ★ my penis no longer paying attention ★ But don’t treat me like a porn star before a camera ★ I was sad or I was happy ★ either way I drunk too much of life ★ no need treat me at all ★ I return the world to its original odor ★ Because every meadow has one rock that annoys ★ such is the staple in the centerfold ★ And every metal has one surface that alloys ★ the parking at the broken parking meter ★ This thing called “I” ★ This thing called “you” ★ Prose and cons ★ Yes Wife should have guessed ★ I got me a new lover ★ Jesus the brother ★ Jesus the scarecrow ★ Jesus and his bloody split ends ★ I lost my dog tags ★ and I pitched my scripture ★ Didn’t you hear? ★ I’m going to hell because I murdered the devil ★