While you are me, and I am almost you,
I cannot help but think you spin me lies.
I do not think that what we say is true.

Teach yourself joy,
the therapist sings to you, white strands splitting her black hair.
One paper heavier, you leave her office,
contemplating the self-care list she gifted you. Cursed you with.

Molten air stifles, sea-thick
and as sickening. Pocked stones
become bowls I water with
weighted limbs. Drained pith, dry bones

‘Twas the night before Christmas and I froze in my pond
When I heard a wassailing from the town close anon
A dozen stout peasants with drink all aglow
Were knocking on doors in the gentle-fall snow

six feet down and you sat
in the garden filling your notebooks
with scrawled labyrinths; circus tents
overlapping the paths and midways.

oh yes, I've seen the way you look at me
through sea-glass dark as pits of mud-torn mire
your heat-struck, jagged ditches lay desire
too plainly, how you want to hear me scream

The plasticsmith waits for the children to return
with buckets full of scraps, bags, bottles, and toys
meticulously scrapped and washed and clean.
The buckets are weighed, then into the crucible they go,
rendered down to grayish brown ingots, made ready
for shipment from the Patch to the factories in the City.

When I float along the deep abyss, every rotting worm writhes
to be near me, every putrid parasite begs
for me to eat him whole. The School of Worship
comes out from hiding, longing for salvation
in my generous arms, and in the Midnight Mass,
the angler’s lure is dimmed by my dazzling spring.

When I wake, it’s to hear the last siren,
receding to its distant causeway, banks of
salt, their bygone shackles of sand.

I hear, dig out what calls to you down
to an aragonite shore—stay gentle, as
you clean away the remains of so many

Beyond the boundaries of my yard,
water flows through furrows in a field,
harvested and fallow now, where corn waved
and last year's winter wheat greened the ground
through all the cold brown barren time.