This Is What Poems Are: With Mercy

Despite My Asbestos Gloves, The Cough Is Filling Me With Black, And A Red Powder Seeps Through My Veins.

If You Meet A Cross-eyed Person You Must Plunge Into The Grass, Alongside The Chilly Ants, Fish Through The Green Fingernails And Come Up With The Four-leaf Clover.

We Are America. We Are The Coffin Fillers. We Are The Grocers Of Death. We Pack Them In Crates Like Cauliflowers.

I Brush My Hair, Waiting In The Pain Machine For My Bones To Get Hard, For The Soft, Soft Bones That Were Laid Apart And Were Screwed Together. They Will Knit. And The Other Corpse, The Fractured Heart, I Feed It Piecemeal, Little Chalice. I'm Good To It.

O Yellow Eye, Let Me Be Sick With Your Heat, Let Me Be Feverish And Frowning.