The End of the Year

Spent the last few days of December
squatting in the shitter, expelling what seemed like
a never-ending stream of fecal matter.

It was baffling; my meals had been far from exotic,

in fact, I hadn't eaten much all week.

My bowels became an excremental clock,

striking every hour without exception,

as if my body was incrementally being purged

of the year's dregs, emptying itself out

so as to start off fresh. It could have been worse. 

The other day a woman at work

was heard screaming in the lower level restroom,

apparently trying to give herself an enema.

Of course, it's tempting to make cracks

about these events, and how, looking back, 

they seem indicative of the type of year it's been.

Besides, our discomfort about defecation still compels us

to titter when the subject enters conversation.

But I felt for that poor woman, shuddered at her frustration.

It's hard to move forward when you're doubled over,

clutching your stomach. My own biggest goal in 2011

was to unblock my own psychic constipation,

to stop holding in the lifetime's worth of shit

that had accumulated in my system.

I made a concerted effort to gaze into that chasm,

to face the ordure armada down there in the basin,

and to accept the truth about myself, no matter

how offensive the bouquet. I long to create 

something beautiful from that waste.

Like a virgin roll of tissue, the new year awaits.

Malibu Sunrise

The strands of spider silk that connect us

across great distances in this random flyspecked life
are suddenly drawn tight, like laces corseting the tongue

of a hightop pair of Chuck Taylors,
as he slips onto the bar stool beside me
at the fire hall, orders two highballs, one for himself

and the other for his latest lady friend, 
waiting blankly back at the table for her man. 
I haven’t seen him in years, 

and considering everything he’s been through,

I shouldn’t be shocked at how he’s aged,
and yet I am: eyes popping from deep sockets,

grin gone snaggletoothed and gray.
“I guess you heard,” he slurs, and I nod and ask,
“How are you doing? Are you okay?”
“I’m doing great,” he spits, pickled in sarcasm.

“How would you be doing, you hear some asshole’s 
been going around saying he put his prick
in your daughter’s mouth?” He leans in closer, 
breathing Johnny Walker, breathing kerosene, and mutters, 
“I sit in the car, in front of the house, waiting 
for the motherfucker, and when he steps out 
then all I say is, are you Jesse? And dude says yeah, so then...”
He cracks his knuckles into his palm, again and again.
His forearm is decorated with script, the word Princess:

the name of his daughter, who just turned eighteen.

By some coincidence, it's also the name 
of his old lady, herself just twenty-one,
and still waiting back at the table for that orange juice and rum.
She recently honored him with him another son.
He delivered the child himself, pulled over

by the side of the road on the way to the hospital
a month after making parole.
Another in an seemingly endless series 
of exhausting miracles. 

“The system’s rigged,” he declares, 
savagely tearing at his cuticles
and hocking a great wad of phlegm at the linoleum. 
“Fucking assholes. I got three years probation, 
anger management classes up the butt.

I know I fucked up. No question. I mean, I got caught. 
But look. In my shoes 
you would have done the same thing. 
You know it’s true. I guarantee.” 
A braid of November cobwebs dangles from a vent 
in the ceiling, twisting along with the crepe paper streamers.

My mother trills that it’s time to light the candles. 
It’s a surprise birthday party for my stepfather, 
though later, out of the earshot of his old lady,
he’ll assure me that he was only pretending 
to be surprised, that he knew the whole time, 
and also that if it been his daughter, this Jesse guy 
would no longer be in possession of a full set of genitals. 

But right now, his son, having become hypnotized
by the television broadcasting the game, 
suddenly remembers his mission 
and swivels and staggers away from the bar, 
each fist clutching a cocktail the color of flame, 
as everyone in the hall begins to sing. 
And, downing the last of my drink, I join right in.

Joyful and Triumphant

The cat slumbers in a nest of wrinkled tissue
wadded in a cardboard box. The foil fir
is dark. The lights strung outside knock
against the frozen rafters of the porch.
My girlfriend’s in the kitchen, gossiping with her mother

on the phone. I can’t make out the words,

just her voice’s warm murmur
until the heater bangs on and drowns her out.
I think of my own mother, forcing her heathen children
to sit around the tree and read

that hoary old nativity story  

from the onionskin pages of her Good News Bible

before we could unwrap our gifts.
Distracted shepherds letting their flocks wander,

senile old men mistaking retinal detachment for stars.
We’d recite the testimony of those unreliable narrators 

in funny voices to spite her, to celebrate
the triumph of the cynical over the faithful.
Now, years later, the thrill of victory has faded.

The candle is bright, but does not provide enough warmth

to drive the chill from my hands.

I call my mother’s voice mail, leave a message.

No doubt she’s out at midnight mass. 

The cat doesn’t bother to look up from its cradle

as I rise and cross the room

and, for what little good it will do,

plug in the tiny lights of the tree.  

Election Year (Paperwhites)

Bowls and bowls of them crowd the counter

in the tiny sun room. It’s shocking how smooth

and white the roots are, rubbery tentacles sprouting 
from the bulbs’ brown vellum to search for 
moisture among the black stones.

Oh, it is so cold, and not yet winter;

the Japanese maples still clutch handfuls

of their miniature leaves, the windows

have not yet been brushed with frost. 

The cats flop themselves down

in front of the kitchen heating vent, and I’m tempted

to join them there on the linoleum. Instead,

I stamp my feet and warm my hands

in the wet steam rising from the kettle.

I worry about Edgar, the gigantic striped spider

who’s been occupying the driveway, 
having strung her web between the wall
and the recycling bin. Life will be a little emptier

without her bloated, terrifying presence.

We will have to make do without her comforting menace,

be content to watch the yard through the chilly glass,

shivering in the cold air that seeps under the cat door,

waiting for spring with its batch of baby spiders,

its blooming paperwhites.
 

The Night Before the Night the Levee Broke

     Walking home through the stinging, icy rain, you follow the narrow strip of pavement until it ends, and then you take the shoulder of the road, splashing through puddles, feeling the gravel bite through the thin tread of your sneakers. Soon even that ceases to be navigable, your way blocked by heaps of soggy leaves beaten to mush by the cold rain. The road is narrow and cars whip recklessly around the curve. You wait for a gap then dash to the other side, but you’ve only traveled a few yards when a barricade of tangled tree limbs felled by the storm causes you to stop and scale the slick embankment, the soil nearly liquid save for an occasional root or sharp stone. You heave yourself up, five feet or so above the roadway, and thread your way between the trees. The rain is louder here, ticking against the leaves that carpet the sparse grass like wet paper stars. You cut across the parking lot of a church, an old folks’ home, and up the alley so riddled with stone- and brick-filled potholes it resembles a riverbed more than a road, then finally you’re home and in your dry room, where you strip off your clammy clothes and slip the plastic bag beneath the mattress just as your stepfather’s new car glides up the driveway and disappears into the garage. You grimace the sound of his feet stamping on the doormat, then you think of the plastic bag, and when he stomps into the living room and sees your face he asks you what the hell are you smiling about and I hope you spent the afternoon in pursuit of gainful employment and you just head to the bathroom to grab a towel to dry your hair and don’t say anything. He follows you and stands in the doorway and says look at me when I’m talking to you, and you look at him and you’re close, you’re so close, so very close, but you’re not quite there yet. 

     And the rain is drumming on the roof and gushing through the drainpipes and overflowing the gutters. 

      And you dry your hair without saying a word.

Sure, what the hell, why not

One of the three final designs I considered for Improvisation.

Deep-Fried Demons

Misfortune oozes through the air

this chill and dreadful night in late October,
and it smells remarkably similar
to breaded chicken sizzling in the deep-frier.
Squatting on a stoop, I luxuriate blissfully 

in the irresistible odor of oily batter 
that wafts from the vents 
of the Cajun restaurant’s kitchen.

I can taste that crispy skin, can feel 
the hot grease trickle down my stubbly chin.

The sushi place across the street exudes 
no olfactory evidence

of the hand-rolled ghosts and quiet rice 
no doubt waiting patiently within. 
The flimsy paper lanterns in the window
seem chintzy and unambitious. 

By contrast, the chicken shack is boisterous 
and garishly lit, ejecting a crowd of patrons 
from its noisy gullet.

The chattering crowd staggers along the pavement 

like a brain-addled millipede. Flames flicker

within the revelers’ cupped palms,
lapping  at the tips of their cigarettes.
As they pass, I ask to bum a smoke 
and one of them taps a menthol from its pack,
holds the lighter steadier than I’d be able to. 

Leaves lie at my feet, little solar panels stripped 
and, having served their purpose, 
now find themselves laid off from the limbs 
where they’ve labored their entire lives.

The empty oxygen factories flash their skeletons 
in an attempt to frighten the sated patrons,

but the revelers remain laughing and oblivious, 
their heads swirling with spirits,

bodies lifted into the night, bellies fluttering
with a flock of tiny wings. 

Attachment

A hawk casually drapes its wings

across a November gust

high above the humped back of

the roller coaster

as across the highway

a young mother lets her small child 

pump gas, handing her a wad of singles 

to pay with when she's finished.

The bell jingles as the little girl 

hurls herself repeatedly against
the service station door

to finally bump it open.

The attendant behind the counter 

looks up from his magazine.

Traffic hisses on the wet road. 

The hawk plummets. 

A tree somewhere holds on tightly

to its remaining leaves.

Adam’s Rib, Doused in Turpentine (by Willem de Kooning)

     First you take some wobbling globs of flesh, knead them and pound them, pummel them like dough then press them together into slabs of gooey putty. Then you stretch them, fold them over, twist them with both fists, place in each of their outspread palms a sizzling firecracker. Poke a few puncture wound eyes and slash an afterthought mouth and that, my son, is how you make a woman. 

      Next you impregnate her, flood her orifice with your oozing phlegm, slather her buried eggs with creamy smegma. As the months crawl by, watch her body swell larger and larger until it appears she will burst, but before she does her legs will fly apart and her pelvis will convulse and she will shoot fetus after splattering fetus from her vaginal barrel, until her progeny, all female, stand before her, boneless and dripping, a coven of exploded crones performing rubbery rumbas from canvas to canvas, leaving behind them runny puddles of linseed oil. 

     And then what? What can you possibly do next, standing in the middle of this room, surrounded by all your writhing, wriggling daughters, with their flopping boobs and sloppy twats flapping in all directions, sacks of organs turned inside out, spilling viscous fluids all over the gallery floors?  What do you do when they ask if you’d like to dance?

         I suggest you fucking dance.

Ask Me Again Tomorrow (Lick the Knife)

An old man staggers onto the bus. He is tall and walks as if he is actually a midget balanced on the shoulders of another midget hidden within the folds of his coat. He has dark skin and a full white beard and wears a floppy black hat. He looks like Uncle Remus, or a reject from a Flan O’Connor fable. He stiffly lowers himself onto the seat next to me. He smells like a mixture of cologne and smoke; not cigarette smoke, or wood smoke, but the smoke of something that wasn't meant to burn but did anyways. It takes a minute before I realize that he doesn’t smell of smoke at all but of ash.   

*

Two young guys get on within a stop of each other and start yelling to each other loudly across the aisle.“How’s things going with whatserface, that chick from Digger’s?” the first asks.“Chelsea? Get this. She's moving to Kenya to work at this baby elephant orphanage. She says her job is to sleep cuddled up right next to the baby elephants so they don't die of sadness. Can you fucking believe that? I mean, with all the problems in the world today and she’s worried about baby elephants being sad? How fucking selfish is that?”
“That’s fucked up. She was pretty hot, though. Dude, this is our stop. Pull the thing.”

*

When the two kids get up, the old man leans forward and asks the porcelain-faced redhead in the seat in front of him what she's reading. She plucks out an earplug and says, "What?"
“I said, what’s that you're reading?”
She flashes him the book cover. “Harry Potter.”
“Oh, that’s garbage.” He shakes his head theatrically. “That’s absolute garbage. You shouldn’t be reading that. Hey, let me ask you something. You twenty-one?”
She nods.
“Good, then I can talk to you.”
“You talked to me before.” The girl has a high-pitched yet scratchy voice, not at all what I imagined.
“Oh yeah? What did we talk about?”
“You drove a cab in Phoenix.”
The man rasps with laughter. “That’s right, ’83 to ’85. What stop you getting off at?”

*
 
I pull the yellow cord and step off the bus and stand on the corner, waiting for the traffic signal to change. I notice a girl crouching in the storefront window of the yarn store, painting the fake walls white with a stubby roller. Milky plastic crinkles at her feet. It looks as if she is on display in some aquarium or zoo. She has an ass like a bird, an ink black ponytail, brown socks bunched up around her ankles. Her shoelaces are untied. I look down to make sure that mine are not before I cross the street.

*

I cut through the city park, which has for a month now been filled with tents and tarps and homemade shelters of the protesters. Cardboard signs jut out everywhere like tombstones in a colonial graveyard, Sharpied with slogans like We Are the 99% and Two Parties No Voice, and one that reads Keep Shopping Everything is Under Control. A kid is twisting and pinching balloons into animals while a crowd of kids in hoodies and a couple of bike cops watch. A pit bull pants at his owner’s feet beneath a bench. When I get to work, there is a message there from a friend saying her second youngest son was shot to death by a federal agent in a McDonald's in Honolulu at three o’clock this morning. I can’t believe my baby’s gone, she writes. To think I was dancing last night. I’ll never dance again. How can I go on.

And the day, the day, the day, stretches its claws but does not pounce, satisfied to gnaw on the thing it has already got trapped between its paws.   

High-Voltage Aviary

Safe beyond the chain link fence and barbed wire
loom the jumbled components of the generator.
Like an evil scientist's inventory, or
Soviet dream-house of the future,
the pieces stand, seemingly at random 
though their placement is actually well-planned,
 rods and cones and boxes strung together
with miles of thick cables, and painted 
a uniform non-color.
Above the low whirring rises a cacophony of chirping,
so clamorous I think it must be a recording
looped from loudspeakers to keep the birds away,
like the plastic owls strung beneath the eaves
of an amphitheater. But no, as I look closer, I can see
the bobbing of a head, the flicker of a wing
-birds by the hundreds perched on the wires, the transformers.
With feathers the color of metal, they remain camouflaged
amongst the machinery, performing their symphonies
conducted by some invisible baton
here in the orchestra pit, their electric nest.

49th Parallel

West of Montana Street and due east of Denver
in what used to be an all-black neighborhood
stands a statue of Paul Bunyan, the patron saint of Portland.
Oregon, that is; this city whose name was decided
in a coin toss, then shanghaied and dragged from Maine 
across the Great Divide.
Though he stands thirty-some feet high,
grinning like an idiot, he fits in
with all the other Stumptown hipsters,
with his facial hair and flannel,
leaning forward on the handle of his ax.
It’s just past noon and I’m waiting for the train, 
watching some kids put pennies on the tracks,
and I follow Paul’s gaze to where it rests upon 
the Dancing Bare -the sign of which is helpfully festooned
with a crossed-out cartoon of the other kind of bear, 
you know, the animal, I guess to avoid confusion,
as if customers might expect to find
actual performing animals rather than just
human women taking off their clothes.
The door opens and out steps an angel
-that is, a small blonde girl wearing a halter top
and a pair of cardboard angel wings
spray-painted white. There is glitter in her hair.
She squats on a milk crate and sucks down a cigarette
beneath the banner advertising Amateur Night
and six-dollar rib-eyes every Tuesday.
It’s a trite image, strictly freshman photography stuff,
but Paul can’t seem to take his painted eyes off her,
and I can’t get her out of my head as I ride south,
past the string of old motels -the Viking, the Palms,
and the Monticello, its sign lit with a picture 
of that famous presidential residence, whose facade 
displaced the buffalo and the Indian on the nickel,
though we must be at least three thousand miles away
from Virginia.

Ithaca 1999

I helped heave the barber’s chair into the back of the pickup truck
of the couple who had driven all the way from Connecticut to haul it off.
When they drove away, we slipped back inside the split-level,
with its rose and honey sponge-pawed walls,
where, comically aproned, you cut the crusts from sandwiches
of clotted cream and watercress in a parody of English high tea.
Your spaniel zigzagged across the pasture,
cornsilk ears fluttering like banners behind her.
I slept heavily in the ocher guest room beneath the cow skulls
and mirrors framed with cedar, strung with knuckles of garlic.
That was the last time. The next time
the leaves were turning scarlet on the mountain
and you would throw back the curtain to show off the larder
stuffed with cans, the water purifier, the flour grinder.
Canisters of lamp oil. Bottles of vitamins. Cases of bourbon.
You don’t want to be in the city when it happens, you said.
They’ll be chopping down telephone poles for timber.
The hands of the crossbows counted down the hours
from their pegs above the galoshes in the closet.
Not a barrel in sight, but box upon box of cartridges.
 

Found Visual Poem #3

Found Visual Poem #2

A story about monsters (and the people who love them)

Every city is
a labyrinth,
and as we
weave our way
through the
intersecting
streets, we
sometimes bump
into our fellow
prisoners, all of us
hoping to get out
before Asterion,
the Minotaur,

catches and
devours us.

 




The name 
of this particular 
labyrinth
is Los Angeles.













Improvisation  
a novel in verse, an epic poem in prose
 

Drop Cake Dress

Her lipstick is like the smear 
of glittery dust

from a creamed silverfish.

She taps the jar,

spilling pills into the lid

which she swirls, listening

to them tick together.
Her eyelids drop, half-moon

black smears.

She takes nothing. Remains

hollowed out, with nothing 
rattling within her.

I curl my fingers around

the neck of the bottle,

flip the cap with my thumbnail.

She crumples to the carpet.

She stands in the dry bathtub, 
fingertip tracing a runner 
in her fondant stocking.
When she steps out
I towel her off and breathe 
sour milk into her hair.

Platypus

Tug off your gloves
so I can kiss and kiss and kiss

and kiss the back of your hand 

until it is slick with slobber, then slide my tongue 
between your fingers chewing on the cuff 
of your sleeve my eyes wobble toward you, 
their whites almost blue the veins

in my wrists throb with the thought

of your teeth I am cutting a window 
in your belly peeling back the skin to form 
a pouch so you can carry me around 
I am not a bird but I leave birdlike tracks across 
your powdered forehead droppings I am prying up

the nails with my beak pulling back the boards to see

what’s been buried there I climb

grab you by the scruff and drag

your pelt to the door stuff it

under sure it's good and tight I squeeze

every gushing geyser has its own

story name resumé I pry

open the mouth of every wild 
beast no matter how fierce no matter 
how small or extinct I put my fearless 
head into the mouth of the frog 
the stoat the shrew the hairs

on the top of my scalp tickle the tonsils

of foxes clog the throats of grouse my tongue

pummels your uvula like a fist knocking 
a punching bag you try to extricate yourself 
from between my lips stuff yourself back 
into your gloves the ones that no longer fit. 

Poem Written the Evening Before a Spent Satellite is Scheduled to Hit the Earth

The giant red clown-nose
of the rising sun
leaves the hills behind
as the century begins
with a botched punchline.

We drive past a crowd
of animal rights activists
chanting and waving placards
outside the rubber chicken factory.

The internet warns us of
a giant custard cream pie
hurtling through space on
a collision course with earth.
Or maybe it's a meteor.
The scientists are uncertain
and, in fact, seem more than
a little intoxicated. 

God sheepishly staggers back to the bar,
asks if he can use the phone,
says, "I can't believe I did this, but
I locked my keys in the car again..."

Nightmares of a Giant Hand Clutching a Shoe (Polyphylla Decemlineata)

A light sleeper, she awoke to the thud 
of a heavy bug hitting the floor

to land on its back, all legs wildly churning.
What makes such an insect lose its grip?
Now that I think about it, how did it ever

cling to the ceiling in the first place?
She didn’t bother to ask, but let loose a wild shriek, 
flipped the bedside garbage bin to trap 
the creature underneath, careful not to squash it,
being even more afraid of squirting out its insides 
than of being bitten, or even just brushed by
a flailing leg, a madly waving antenna. 
She shuddered just to imagine that tickle on your skin,
and summoned me to dispose of the intruder. 
 I think it hissed at me, she said. 
June beetles tend to do that when threatened, 
I said, explaining that the sound 
comes not from its mouth but from air forced 
from its body by its vibrating wings. 
They’re harmless, though. Isn’t that 

fascinating? I asked her. 

Kill it, she said. 

A few days later, she shook me awake 

in the middle of the night. Look, she bawled. 

There’s another one. 

Another appeared the following night, 

and two more over the weekend. 

The cat must be bringing them in, she decided; 

she’d shut all the windows, and the beasts 

were too huge to slip in through the cracks of the old house.

I patiently deported each one, carrying them

across the street to release into the neighbor’s hydrangeas. 

The ones that had died in captivity, I took 
into the basement, put them in jars on a shelf 
where you wouldn't see them. 

By the end of the summer I had collected enough

to create my own suit of beetle armor. 

I glued the striped shells all over my jacket, 

then eyed the ceiling, wondering if, 

since I was now part bug, 

I might be able to cling upside down from it. 

I cracked my knuckles, flexed my fingers, 

and stretched my hands toward the wall...

And it worked! 
I scrabbled up to the ceiling 

and scurried happily around the light fixture.

Unlike the sulky Mr. Samsa, I was delighted

by my transformation. However, 
no sooner had I begun to enjoy 
my upside-down existence

than I felt myself losing my grip 
and I fell, landing on my back on the floor, 

legs wildly churning as I tried to right myself. 

The light was shut out by the garbage can
she slammed down over me.

I scrabbled at the metal sides but the can 

was too heavy to lift. I cried out for her

but all she heard was a hissing, 

like air forced from beneath the striped shells 
of a scared scarab's wings. 

Low Country Boil (Frogmore Stew)

"To rescue the banal is every lyric poet's ambition" -Charles Simic

Advice for young poets, novice prospectors: 
when you're sifting through the litterbox,
you shouldn't be surprised if you find 
something other than gold.

I skipped another high school reunion this summer,
and I finally understood what they say about time 
seeming to speed up as you get older: 
the last ten years felt a fraction as long 
as the decade preceding them.
It would have been interesting to rehaunt my old 
swampy hunting grounds. When I think of all the years 
I spent wallowing in that greasy creek,
or kneeling on its slimy banks, hoping to snag something 
other than stunted crayfish and rusted Schlitz cans, 
when I think of all the time I wasted 
thinking I could, indeed, rescue the banal 
from where it festered in the mud, in the funk...

Maybe I just didn't have what it took, maybe this
just wasn't what I was meant to do, to be. Though
to be honest, I haven't come up with anything better yet.
Here I am, rattling toward middle age and still
cobbling things together, whacking nails 
into planks of knotty pine too waterlogged 
for the fire, still chucking stems and rinds 
and bits of gristle into the pot,
into this half-baked mess of my life
set on permanent simmer, always just shy
of coming to a full boil. Here I am, 
still supergluing the cracked sporks 
and laying them out alongside 
the duct-taped Styrofoam cups.
I fill the cups with murky cocktails 
stirred together from the dregs 
of every dusty bottle behind the bar. 

Still I dip my spoon, slurping up the slop,
wondering what the chances are of coming across
a jewel slipped from its fitting, some stray gold nugget
dropped by some molar-splitting miracle 
into the broth.

Visual Poem found at the bus stop

MULTI-TASKING PHARMACISTS

LOST LITTLE QUILT

BALLOONS WITH OLIVE ROOTBEER

Roaster

Your stiff body is tipped into the chute
and carried swiftly along on the conveyor belt.
Your shiny flesh crackles,

parasols catching your dripping fat

which turns their paper skins translucent
just before they burst into flame.

There are precious x's stitched in gold 
across both of your eyes.
Every hair smolders, a field of smoking wicks,
and then you crumble.

And then comes the waiting room, 
the decompression chamber, the firing range.
Your new body, less substantial but more durable,
gets put through its paces:

every time you get punched in the stomach 
you sprout a set of wings, and every time 
you get a blow job, those same wings

get sucked right back into your body again. 

Afterwards, you balance, exhausted,

on the thin icy blue balls of heaven

in an endless, airless hallway 

where you pray for a fire to warm your hands.

But there's no oxygen here to allow anything to burn.

You look down at all those devils sizzling down there

and say to them Look, kids, you don't know

the first thing about suffering.

Beside you, the saints shiver in their bathrobes,

wondering how much trouble they'd really be in

if they shot down a cherub or two and plucked

their feathers to stuff downy comforters 
for themselves so they can finally get some shut-eye.

You weep yourself to sleep, or maybe just slip into 
a frostbitten delirium, and some old guy wraps 
his beard around you like a scarf and tells you 
that when an angel cries, the tears sear the earth, 
carving channels through the rock 
 and seeping down to the molten core

of the planet, where they cause

a series of explosions that send magma

shooting up to the surface in a spray 
of sizzling droplets. Look, he says,

and when you wake up, it’s true,
that very thing he said would happen, is,

and you lean over and burn your lips on the burning,
bubbling fountain of molten flame.

Filled with new heat, blood burning through your veins,
you cram your hooves into golden sandals, tuck your tail up

under your robes, cram your halo on
over your horns, then turn and kiss
the virgin on the cloud beside you goodbye,

slipping her a bit of scalding tongue 
before spreading your hairy wings 
and swooping down...