Baku

I sense you are arriving,
ready to eat my dreams
and leave me blank and drooling
at tomorrow’s breakfast table.
The clicks of your claws
are not as subtle as your euphoric sister
in how she rides inside
the pores of whisky and wine
to float along the narrowed
capillaries of my brain,
making mush of grey matter.
No, you I can almost hear
climbing the ladders of my soul
on such nights when the moon
stumbles up and down the sky
and dreams offer hope
of escapes, new meetings and secrets worth keeping.
This is typically when you arrive on your tiny toes,
tapping along the Formica hallways of my memory,
past where my spent muses scream
from their paper cages
and into my vast factory of intimations.

I know you need no keys to move
through the doors; you simply chew
them off their hinges, leaving no fantasy
undigested, just this dust
and the splinters of disreality’s sweet visions
piled as traces of what could maybe be
forgotten.

Only this vague unknowing remains
present for my glazed, rewoken stare.
This vacant taste of what I’d thought I’d chewed.

Your sloppiness is your one concession,
the way you depart quick enough to leave
your footprints and turdlets behind. A gift
as I reconstruct the world
against the sun’s speedy particles. I find something
mysterious but not quite monstrous
has torn up my garden, the marks
of your destruction alluding to evidence erased.
And, this at times gives me hints
to reconstruct your crimes, to imagine you
with your snout and tusks and dinky tail
rutting through my multi-winged flights,
epics of mayhem and under-ocean sex:
the sort of stuff that dreams are made of.



by jerry gordon
6.9.6