He wakes up dreaming of college girls—
wasting another bogus life. Nights
spent hustling cigarettes, days in a
cheap hotel. He returns to the same
blindness, an alley of alcohol.
There he sees you, stranger, woman of
his furious dreams—angel leaning
with your wings against the dirty bricks.
Your eyes are deep as snowdrifts, your lips
like quicksand, teeth like beautiful knives.

Your father’s jewels hang down between your
breasts like curses. You want to enter
his tennis court of vicious desires.
He stands there smoothing down his mustache.
Your love grows oddly useful then, in
the darkness of this city, a strange
city, guarded by spiders. The birds
in the little park grin like demons.
Together you move into the old
abandoned theatre down the street.

At night he pulls a baby from your
lips. The sky grows brittle with spring. How
drab his nudity begins to seem
in this nation of taxidermy!
Now is the season when motors get
their fur, and orphans go up in smoke.
His face begins to weaken in the
middle of a smile. You bury your
fingers in his heart like nails. Around
a campfire, the wives begin to bark.

Deep in his summer of guilt, the gods
of ignorance come and take away
the valuable engines of his mind.
His gun slows down and stops. He crouches
like a maimed animal in your heat.
He spits out gloves, losing his soul in
a cough. Thunder falls from the sky like
rags. But all he can hear is the flap
of your breasts as you run from the farm
where you were almost kindled and raped.