The sheet peels off. The spirit dies,
Yet sight persists as through a haze.
In death, we’re left with just our eyes.

A drafty basement. Bitter coffee. 12 steps.
Attendees join four-fingered hands
and bow blue, green, orange, yellow heads,
in surrender and serenity.

[This is the poem.]

If ever cheese were cheese, then surely you.
I’ll never eat another; that much is true.

His faithless cock wants to feel her sigh:
tender, deliberate, slow—
He could never love her like he wants her thighs,
her sleepy bending legs, vulgar phrases she borrows.

Odysseus stood before the food court, flummoxed, bewildered, confused,
bereft of all ideas, no clever scheme could he devise,
None of his considerable craft was of use,
Nothing he knew had prepared him for this, no experience,
Not all of his wanderings in search of his beloved Ithaca had readied him,
he was lost, adrift, as surely as if he had been storm-tossed, alone, on the wine-dark sea.

Putting on thy bra is not an option
When getting dressed to act’ally start the day.
Not doing so will trash a plan’s adoption
And leave one’s girls so aimlessly to sway.

KISS
I think it was a Halloween concert
in the nineties, when they were already old
TV cameras picked up a slice of
Gene Simmons’ ass cheek
visible though a stylish hole in his leather pants
It looked like what you see when
you first open a can of spam

I hate to argue with you,
but I must say the sky is not blue.
It is studded by blemishes—
clouds smeared by the oily effervescence
of sunrises, sunsets,
bisected by rainbows,
vivisected by the worm-trails of airplanes.

All pyros know
the instructions on Black Cat firecrackers:
Light fuse and retire quickly.
I should have lived my life like that.