It is the last hour before
The body's failure will swamp
The struggling mind in dreaming sleep;
And a dull fly, a single one
Of daylight's swarming insect drift,
Swats the silence across the ceiling
As it blats and bumbles into a personal oblivion.
You might almost think
The seas of Tellos froze.

Let us celebrate
Ripeness.
Nectarines are not forever.
Conserving caution will not sustain
Bruised liquids until tomorrow.
So let us celebrate
The action of the teeth,
The kiss of capture,
The running juice of appetites in action,
The consummation.

The splashed catastrophe
In the wrecked subway car
Will glare undimmed in memory for a lifetime.
She will not forget.
My own toe opened by the bottle glass
I do forget.
Scars bear no colors of the rainbow.

As the scalpel peeled the skin from the intestines,
A week's decay gave evidence of its workings.
One boy drew back in a kind of horror.
But dead is dead, and dead
Is numb to its own destructions.
I can gut fish without feeling,
Slit the skin from anus to gills,
And unravel the guts to the gulls.
It's only hospitals that give me horror,
The freak museums where catheterized flesh
Drains to glass and porcelain,
Where the human form is pinned
Like a worm on a tray of wax and water,
Where the mind rises from barbiturates to the sight
Of the white robes of science in a laboratory light.

Rain storms the city.
Liquor
Siphons the night crowds from the streets —
Ale and ice, lager —
The hotel crouches under rain,
Slurred voice and muffled light,
And water puzzles down the paving,
Washing the roads where the neon sinks
Red, amber, green.
Within,
Bulk beer in chorus:
At the bar,
Hands busy the city
For the lawful thuggery
Of voices and traffic in terminal tumult.