THE ROSE
Cupid coughs and out comes a rose.
The flower’s wrath digs a pocket of thorns in Cupid’s throat.
He tries to speak but his voice box is filled
With the flower’s hot breath which stirs up shiny demons
So Cupid cries diamonds all afternoon.
He goes to the shoreline and walks on ice floes.
He goes to the zoo and walks on ape toes.
There is envy and boredom and the distracting smell of a bakery.
There is his green overcoat, and his thin sunglasses
Hovering over his nose and the traffic.
THE BOAT
Cupid’s throat is a moat.
He reaches down deep to pull a soaking poem out of it.
He gurgles to recite it.
The oatmeal moon cackles. The streetlights flicker.
A neighbor walking her dog walks faster.
Cupid imagines his children doing somersaults on a boat
Crossing a green ocean to find the land of three-car garages.
His poem trails off into a description
Of a daughter who was never born
And how the robin’s nest is whiplashed in the vertigo-tree.
How all bodies are eaten pictures,
How the birds drop like leaves of stone.
THE BRAIN
From the ground invisible police cars listen
To Cupid’s undocumented brain
Which is sympathetic to the anonymous migrants,
The wounded prisoners, and the halfwits milling grain.
These abrasive sounds and feelings confuse the police recording device.
It has a migraine and begins to spit out poems:
“I was a star” “The sky is dirt and skeletons”
“The villain resembles an old bandage”
For a moment the officers are carried off
Into an unlicensed inner playground
But thanks to the blinking lights of the dash cam
They are quickly reinserted among the nipple-less citizens.
Cupid’s brain plays another trick.
It imagines rain will make militant islands grow in the air—
The insurrection of mist.
