FRACTURE II

       I’m on the slanted sofa again
in a house on a cul-de-sac
in the desultory bucolic brood
       Rawest hide not of softest tiffanies
thinking of unfriending myself
here where I’m half-asleep, the shape thereof,
covered in a bedlam of cat-fur, urine,
this three-fourth-sleeved coffee-stained shirt,
eyes of Laocoön,
       Uranus removed itself from its axial tilt

where AM thrusts itself towards PM briefly

like a school of fish going to see a swimphony—

       Red Sox & Yankees on the tube (what else
is new?), ferocious wind blowing outdoors,
soot-colored clouds, grating sounds
of grinding chainsaws moiling & spitting
& sparking shrrzzrrzzrrzzrrzz!
       They’ve got an ax to grind
& then a vivid visual of the blades slicing through
the throb of my displaced patella that I guard
with the shield of Achilles—vulnerable bone
split in half, chainsaw slicing off my leg
& then dragged upon some splintered pirate’s
plank, double-jointed air-space lapse
                    loop loop loop               slippery slope
       ghost grabbed the gauntlet with pliers
in-between displacement (“space is a frame
we map ourselves in”):
       Go head & send my kneecap to the polar cap!:
Newsworthy crash-test-dummy, Social Experiment
using me as a guinea pig:
       W.W.S.A.E.I.C.B.D.? (What Would the
Self-Appointed ‘Experts’ In ‘Comment Boxes Do?’)—
you may find yourself surprised to discover
what is uprooting between this diaphanous fracture!
out sprouts an emergent inflorescence
of fair clusters up through the wickets,
unwinding a birthing
       inference, tuba-bloomed umbrage, puffed up
like forced sensual lips puckered outward like
George Herman Ruth’s lightning bolt bat
pointing towards the inevitable bull’s eye!—
unstoppable avalanche, menstruating gizmos:
       I could tear into
my fractured canyon of perspicuity
upon the chaise lounge like a spammy ‘palm reading’
turning violent! Giving the wrong ‘info’
(looking beyond the flesh-lines, pressing
my physiognomy) . . .
       I recap the day’s events like
a tarp covering a playing-field, now
waiting for an incision, cement still skinny
to my tender bones, covered in it, camouflaged
like the Phyllocrania paradoxa—
       I await my own anesthesia as if
I already sense it, taste it,
like a mastodon trapped by a gang of cavemen.
What if I slip again?
       I think of slipping again
this time upon a slope of wild strawberries
in a silent light
where the fruit of the Hesperides
sprinkles necklaces of garden debris
intermediating between the spaces of gravity
       kneeing me.
       Unlike Philip Booth, I don’t want to
“talk about walking”—so instead
I will talk about hunger, hunger spilled over
into July; my body glued to the canvas
of these multitudinous walls,
television, computer screens—I need fruit,
so in my mind I walk (hungry), standing
before the beautiful tree & knock
a plate of oranges down, then
go on to pluck figs from their lush
limbs (plantlife flaunts as if like an attraction
of pulling, picking, planting, pruning, needs
human touch, procedures, fixity, &c.)
       Being handicapped comes in handy
to write poem after poem after poem. Glow!
I rise, floating, what are knees again?
I’ve never used my knees in my life, as I float on!
I may as well be nailed up in the room.
There’s no escape. Nailed up!
Whether it is clumsy or sloppy, I cannot swallow
the sleeping pill while
Poetry’s sloganeering snickering depends on
the Unseen Me merely to be.