Stare out a window, any window, until your eyeballs loosen
and you spoon them out of your skull like two warm eggs.
Be sure to keep at least one nerve and one blood vessel
attached to the bowl of pudding that rests upon your spine.
Watch for hungry sparrows and squirrels, watch for children
too young to have forgotten to dream, watch for vandals
with empty burlap sacks, and masks pulled down around
their necks, and sad faces like unpollinated azaleas.
Toss your head as savagely as you wish; pull a scarf across
your eye sockets; touch your finger to the strawberry, plump
with decades of blood-rain, chanting inside your chest;
stomp the blood-worms gathering around your feet.
Have a feast. When else if not now? What else if not this?
For there’s a black veil in the sky, dirt tugging at your legs;
and in your backyard, a campground of bones shivers before
a pile of ears that will go deaf if you hold your tongue any longer.
