Autobiographia

That was prettymuch the story of my life
in profile. I keep thinking about glass, but don’t know what to say
when continually thugs come to me in a dark alley
disguised as you, only a you made of glass
shattering back together. But all that’s behind me now, I’m much better

than I was, a study in human behaviour of the particular sort
of person who says and does these things
in public, which is the region of my soul, O thou. I
consider this more like drawing
a picture of someone drawing
water from a well that figures prominently in a children’s book
about the ins and outs of rigor mortis
and their relationship to fucking. Ouch,
or excuse me, I erupted again. That’s not the right word:

life is scared. Dogs only rarely eat other dogs, it’s just
a myth about our time, like the fish
that ate Pittsburgh. I was born underwater
eventually, they found me in moving reeds. That’s

the honest truth. I work for the city, too,
you guessed it, a tax collector, but right, who cares.
Each sketch is action in a frame advancing
without expectation, in other words, without end.