Polymers

Takes a blow-dryer
to the plastic flower.

Makes its petals
curve the way they’ll be needed

Left sucking long on the last bit
of bubble gum:
out of the lips, it drains
tarry into night.

The eyes itch, too,
harden into glass, rotate
on their own, search for lacquer

to smell into tingling
numbness.
Resin’s dissolution
in the eyes pool. polymers,

polymers, polymers.
I feel them at the end,
     in my toes.

All the things I
think of when I think of
beauty lying

prostrate in the kiddie
pool make bubbles like oaths
from pursed lips.

Suds come to the surface,
     break tension,

                 bandy
on the strength of their rims,
the capaciousness
easily

holding a whole world.
When it
          pops, we’ll
know the bubble was morals
or the moral or

the other eye, which has
          seen. It flows.

Half-fluid, by decade.

Rivers, Forks

Old Throat,
what will
you eat on the way?

Does not even
smoke pass
under a cracked window,

smells melt
over a hot stove & hungers?

At urge
through the bow
of a belly
comes more complaints.

Napkin-writ,
it marks the lips. coffee,
honey weds

morning to wet
fingers, sticky
with remains
of a ranch hand.

How we make clean,
delimit the sun
through blinds
as we plan

for drizzle or torrents
in the next town tomorrow?
What do the cracks

for the flowers below
the road
let under?

My soles, wet as fowl. more return
& return! Every
day, the ground
is too full to drink.