1.
the lady hand extended off the couch slightly curled at the fingers and sleeping. it’s drunk flower night. candle plants fly through the sleeper’s nose and she is gardened, rose-willed, remarked on in the literature of the tables and chairs. carpets ground themselves waiting for her.

2.
remains piled in the sink — flies slain during a recent invasion. their ghosts like politics, imagining the swat of magazines aimed at them and missing over and over. the bodies lie still, staid revolutionaries who will not agree to a truce.

the lady hand is the culprit, they whisper. no surrender.

3.
if a man enters here, he is set upon by vaccuums cut loose from their engines, gray winds drawing him in, coating him in all the old they’ve got.

these interior lands are a reservation of the highest order, dead sands, forgotten sacraments, gods unnoticed still imagining they are the drivers of creation.

4.
the lady hand stretched out and sleeping. a branch of forgetting. no argument for relevance. existence its own justification.

what the body burns at its hidden rituals is the solitary business of cells and electricity.

5.
flies open revenant eyes. multiple windows look onto a city of durable goods. the lady hand, the marble of a temple. blunt demands on time, meet the resistance of art and memory.

she has loved once or twice. eats pulp from oranges to recreate the sting of nourishment.

candle plants can exist for years on the fading glow of romantic notions. men cannot fathom their own small place in here.

6.
when the lady hand moves, the audience leaps up, applauding the triumph wrung from the misbegotten play.

if the curtain moves, it’s only to fall. the lady hand holds nothing. everything. the swooning youth, the old rigid honor of the black-tied suitor, the credits read aloud in transparent wings.

this is the medium of the candle plants, the soil of the night.

7.
aztecs, priests of drunk flower night, opened the bodies of their daughters to see if the gods were home.

knock, knock, lady hand. your house is on fire.

your eyes, your stone flavor.

danger is the blessing of the candle plants, the flies sing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ursula LeGuin used to talk of “bung pullers” — pieces that opened new gates. This is one. Meaning? Haven’t got a clue. You tell me.

Whenever they do it
it is dark and they move swiftly.
They do their work
as carefully as artists.

Whoever they are
they go for the intimacies first,
removing lips and tongue,
eyes, the heart, the anus and the genitals.

Whatever they leave behind
is lucky. It’s left alone
by scavengers and other beasts.
Its neighbors low and scoot away in fear.

However they do it
they do it without shedding blood.
They do it without leaving
a signature.

Wherever the body is finally taken to
and burned, the grass will not grow there
for a long time to come. When it does,
the living will have to decide whether or not to eat.

Ever so, ever will be:
mysterious dead left behind,
perpetrators gone, survivors shivering,
body by the wayside, spring on the wind.

Faith says Facebook does a body good.
All that contact does the job, all that
rubbing against your privacy wears off the rough edges.
Pretty soon you’ll be smooth, and no one will know you.
Then the offers will come in, once you’re
superficial. Once that happens you can find a friend
who’ll be salty when you’re salty, sweet when you’re sweet.
It’ll be something else, you’ll want to roll in it
as if it were a sugar scrub.

Faith tells this to everyone. The world
revolves and the names you’ve borne go with it, sliding
across the surface of things until they strike against people
who think they once knew you. They’ll drop a line
and you’ll respond and Faith will be proved right, as she always is,
as you desperately move your bumps around until they mesh with theirs.
Everyone’s getting smoother these days. Everyone’s a matter of fact
until they’re called on their history, and then
the tumbling begins: you’ll make yourself shiny,
tell yourself that this time
it’ll work. The past is past until it strokes you
and you bloom like a supermodel, like a genie
looking for wishes to toss away.

Give me a key. Any key
will do — long old time skeleton, short
cylinder for a chemical cabinet, an
ordinary key
with ordinary teeth. I will take it home,

I have a door that might be perfect for it.
Maybe your key will work,
maybe not.
If not, I’ll add it to the pile
that’s rising in the corner.

If by chance it does
turn, if the metal inside
slides aside and the handle moves,
I’ll let you know. I’ll wait for you
to come over and you can watch me go in —

crawling into the tiny chamber
I’ll bruise my head but it’ll be worth it.
You can hand me all the keys once I’m in,
even the one that did the trick,
and close the door

once that’s done. You can walk home
knowing I’m safe, a little headachy maybe
but secure behind the door that was closed for so long.
It’s all I’ve ever wanted —
my own place, somewhere

I fit; somewhere
I could nurse wounds
old and new until I was either
satisfied with them or they faded away.
(I do not expect them to fade away.)

You’ll get home and open the door to your place
with the key you always use. You’ll sit on the couch
and wonder how I’m doing in here, now that you’ve gone.
It’s like this: I’m not unhappy. I’m just another guy
wondering how I got here. I’m fine, all things considered.

sorting it out today, wondering
how much of what I have believed
about myself and who I am
is so much plastic wood

I fell in love early with “assume a virtue if you have it not”
assume a story if it works
assume a face that bears your chosen hue
assume there are those who won’t look past it

but somewhere in my true wood
there are knots and burrs
and I can’t veneer them enough
to leave no lumps in my surface

even when I dare to touch
the places I suspect they are
I can kid myself into the thought
that it’s my fingers that are suspect

but the ripples I refuse to feel
are there even if I cannot admit
that they are — all those years of covering
all those years of making it up as I went

and when the day comes to strip away
the last pieces of the fake decor
what will I say to myself when I look at the gnarling
the burls and the wormholes and the split grain?

will I say then i was a beautiful man
or will I despair and wail as I light a match
assume the peak of a pyre I should have built long ago
to watch myself fall in upon myself

instead of assuming that a life of wounds and scars
was less valuable than a life of obvious subterfuge?
will I tell myself I was dead either way
and let the wreckage show at last?