The springbok like a slowly-released widow's balloon

caresses the velvet face of the archer

and steals the femur from the melodramatic fawn lisping in the soft arthritic dew, piercing

the cocooning honeydew-melon husband and wife whose heads were deseased by the muffled housekeeper a

swift lion bursting like two leopards like an apiary on the sly

playing the portamento Shylock in braided time a silo

blasting the fly off an absent-minded sleeve (sneeze)

and not even thinking about her almond-like fig in the hoopla

I became     middle-aged     and like an old bandicoot

and diagnosed with the cancer that claimed my lungs I

pulled my fur coat tighter over my lumbago and

spent years preoccupied with the brim of my hat so

the syrup on the floor stained with its cry to heaven

took favour on me, Raoul, the poor salmon salesman

whose bride died in the vapour of brine

her purse still attached to her lips

I begged an icy longshoreman to retrieve the body of the Golden Retriever from the house of disco

I vanished into a sore like a solipsism

even my echo was eaten by the mice who rubbed rhubarb all over my prized possessions, and their langour starched the pea(ch)tree until it stood up like the night's nightcap

I grew half in branches and half like Robin Givens

like a dark snout uprooting the tired aches that spout in the street and stain like credible ice,

whenever you're rooting around somewhere for the diamonds that blink and flake out of the comforting wind that flashes your bones

In the swamp the sofa's lopsided snore rattles in the Christian wind

in the breeze the scones play along with the Eiffel and the warder

into the steel echo the traps are set for the limos of the weirdos,

tin-mouthed and with the repressed grins of the waffles and fellows of the bartending school

(The drunk driver's car will barely start along Applegate as the engine is filled with ruins and free admissions that the case has begun to rhumba

The cheating spouse can barely stand and leans against a wall abandoned by lepers

The jokes about trombones have worn a bit thin

cordoned off by the summons)

This is just your trench here

eaten by pyjamas and the stench of the isthmus

This is just a beach or a throat choked with akimbos

the violet rupture speeds away like a Brownie

the speedboat in quadrangles steps like a quiet mouse in front of the cat's stockings (a fly in the ointment) and

the ivy grows for miles like a bride who shields her eyes against the military

I smiled and I cried and my eyes filled with tears that brushed aside all thought of whimsey

I sat eating sushi and the subtropical climate pulled at my sleeve and ripped some of the skin from my surregional hand

I basked in the melancholy wake of the narwhal

Her lobotomy was announced brusquely with an eye-batting whisper as we

surveyed the stage for any anomaly

a taste of club soda dawned in my chest afire with regret

like the ordinary smell of a clam and the two tiny twins who hoot and claim mistakes

the world vanishes under the hoof of bachelor days (as

I wish the sulphur had not been in the mouth of her Dasher

I wish the surplus and abandoned wrecks had not been stationed along the edge of the thoroughfare

for dachsunds who had been drugged to laugh at

remaindered clowns and a scrap of paper stained with a footprint

The drowned chorus weeps about velour and you dismissively wave your hand and your hand glows with phosphorus and we welcome the wolves into our lonely house

I taste your kiss as if leaving for the merchant-marine and clouds drift through our heads of avocado)