The search for perfection
It’s only natural
I close my eyes and put myself in that place
That not lost just physically invisible place
What eyes cannot see the heart cannot grieve at
Every window tinted
A depot of eyelashes pressed to the viewfinder
And there are bright people
And ceremonies to accommodate their advantages
The money has this peach fuzz to it
There are miles of piping to serve the purpose
Of relinquishing ourselves
Considering you are human

The sea, the moon, and a jail in the cattail’s sway
I’m taking this plastic flamingo to the shooting range
To relive nightly a besieged leisure
Piecing together a lonely tale of a job, a marriage, and a family that loves you
A party line effete and fearing its children
Ultimately on the other side of the others
Take yourself to a series of offbeat Westerns
Snacking on discontinued sweets
It takes a memorable year to decide
But the picnic was off the chain

I had trusted in something horribly nonexistent
In the gabled barns of self-employment that saw far past the tubing river
With no kettle sludge, no heat lightning
With rodents in the wall that sound like congressional whisper tapes
I accelerate the brain-shaped automobile
Through shires of rain
To little cottages for real tennis
And incomplete origami on the kitchen counter
Obstacles of courtship where life is never safe
You get the blues
A leaking nostril that confronts the world
To vast reaches
Using trinkets to outwit evil
And die the right way

Johnny rolls on his deodorant and checks the calendar for fun
Dominique wears a beige cable-knit sweater
Barbara adds sultry sophistication to a cotton-knit zip-turtle top
Jesús is in dramatic torch light with airbrushed boulders
It takes all of our relationships, all of our ties with the environment, to shrink in duration
Not just because of the sexual mechanics of an expensive smelling couple
Modesty is born out of a sense of shame
During the finest epochs
Wearing zone-huggers to bed
Corsets sacrificed to build battleships in the early wars
The climate secondary, the flesh mortified
Torsos with random shoulder hairs
English cleavage, Egyptian cleavage, Sicilian cleavage, Peruvian cleavage
Some kind of systemic vaudevillian act
Where you’re reborn as a fantastic rumor

One of the most ancient monuments in the Western Hemisphere
The entrée festooned with a parasol
Consider: clouded ice cube melting through patio chair
On a tarnished afternoon when we still worshipped the food pyramid
With Miss Utica
Miss Schenectady
Sawmill daughters
Heavy action in a pillowed corner of natural light
As immortality produces no art, no lust

Lake water dripping from the undercarriage of a mallard
The firing pistons in the mallard’s heart
A swarm of bees moving in the shape of a gavel
In the perimeter of sex gods
Wearing jewels and sipping daiquiris
Geysers and trailers and hoop earrings
Snow falling in a town higher up the mountain
The sound of an engine block’s spectacular burst fevers
Today I am a naturalist
Stopping every so often to bite at cool grass blades
Examine a defenseless skeleton
Strain my water through a cloth to avoid the adoring tapeworm
A scratch-off pinned against a brook rock
Golden white pillars of sun on chateaus of aquamarine
Some Native Americans believed consuming gold allowed human levitation
This isn’t true, physically
Though freedom still remains monetary
The earlier notion having died with its creator