Sleeping With The Dictionary

I tell you what. It’s never the definition
that makes its home in your underwear.

Nine times a man rides up to the house.
Nine times he’s turned into a crow

for being obscure. Red handed he’s defined.
Then again, this is the definition

of dissent. You have a hole to dig.
Your whole melts like the pencil sketch of a hole

over a candle’s musketeer. Canopy:
Verb. To redeem the memory

of skin by knitting a forest’s worth
of fingers around the heart.

Compilation: Noun. The place
where wrongs are filtered and shelved

like the idea of order on an island
you’ve seldom seen but floods with rum-

flavored lips and pelican-shredded T-shirts
in your dreams. Who said definitions don’t matter?

Dictionary begs to differ. Duh.
He who never stays long on the same

word, amending his meaning
with every sweet-talking street vendor’s

hand on his boxy ass. It’d be a shame
to find handfuls of old words

sewed into sweaty sheets. The alphabet
suddenly suddenly slow and slipping,

suddenly the outline of an angel sliding
its fingers onto my breast’s modest definition.