JUST BETWEEN USWhat I never told you, is that. Yes, our special that. The thing we share. Why are you doing that thing with your eyes again? I could remind you of those robin’s-egg shoelaces. Our souvenir butter dish, your fiddler crab earrings. Isn’t that right? The hammered tin heart also. We have kind of the opposite of a secret. You know everything I know. Seriously. But maybe this walrus postcard will refresh your memory? I never told you what I never told you because obviously you figured it out yourself. Obvious to me at least. You’re smart that way. The tartan umbrella? Yes? The spare emerald nose ring? Truly, that’s all I have to say. AFTER THE BATTLE COLLAPSES,before the daybeds empty, cancel the flyby fiesta, destroy the galosh shreds. Eleven thousand fingerprints fumbled underfoot, forte. Grasping, hysterical, he hides under leaf duff, irritably invents fragile facts just to juice-up the jury box. Kill the krill, pal, while I leach the groundwater. Muzzle a mutiny? Or nod off, nerveless, spinning like sugar – Overhead, the meathooks deploy. Pawprints lace the linoleum. Quick, make for the closet, run rampant between the hangers. Softly now, comrades. Torpid, lethargic, tunneled underneath U-Hauls, mercenary vermin abandoned our allies. Where did she ship the warehouse keys? X-Acto knives, Excedrin, Kleenex? Your yokel phalanx flays zealots. Their zodiac unpins from its pivot. MUSEUM WALL TEXT FOR OUR BATHROOM WINDOWSILLAt right, orange tabby uncoils from an ammonite’s mouth, low-boards into the bathtub, blue swim trunks saluting Katze zwei’s bodiless leer. Gato tres liberates four goldfish from bowl water to bath, causing gateau quatre to rise from the drink, claws akimbo in terror or starvation. But wait, one finny specimen, extruded from the postcard, lolls in lung-air on a table rock ellipsoid, ready to turn and nibble the greens proffered by a snail shell upside down. At left. Visitors, if bewildered, are now reminded of their raison d’être in this narrow space by the big-as-life human kidney, bent Rodin-Thinker-like, beneath its peaked adrenal gland, a saucy dunce cap. Michelangelo’s shepherd boy, brawned and translucent as ever, has just stepped away from a rosebud-tank toilet. A duck on the lid gapes, in fright or desire, at the great silent urinary aid. A lemon lasso unites Bible hero, commode, and fowl with the orange plesiosaur hatched from its sea urchin mother. At center. Bath-Oil Buddha, his vow to cleanse all sentient beings fulfilled, sits in unbroken samadhi, knowledge bump atop his head rising to a black spout-mouth and a sphere swum with bubbles. A crystal-bodied bat, teardrops at every finger, opens sea-green wings over the Awakened One’s blown-glass-mind. The window light pebbles, slantways at dusk. NO LONGER SLEEPING |
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