I wake up to the taste of expired
salmon feeling like I need the priest
as all the tongues in all my bitten bodies
begin to speak of different things
at the same time
under a marmalade sun of stone and wheel.
and faded revolution.

in the kitchen the tablets spider crawl to life
as a white cat looks at me from the windowsill,
and the tablets are my soul and the cat is my soul
and as I drink the foam birds rise from the brush shades of wings huge shadows huge hard songs like snails
grip the house-edge and
the cat leaps against the screen
and it is like Normandy and Stalingrad (x) and the shelling of the harbors -
cat yellow eyes coming down to mine
like the eyes of a small businessmen about to
fire me for loafing in
the storeroom.

and
listen, 30 minutes later that first bottle of beer
is better than any sex anywhere in any world with any big-assed cow I have ripped silk & lace from. yes, this is God you can grip and insert & become: yellow sun yellow cat eye kitchen floor one more day in the air of the world

with palm leaves
motorcycles crosses power mowers
purple Christs in glass cages at Carondolet ST,
I go into the bedroom where the woman sits rocking my child in her belly
and I take the cigarettes from her hand
light one
begin to cough cough cough
like a horse pulling his first trashwagon
through his frosty useless morning
say in some smail city
where only one man owns a Mercedes

and I am sweating I must stink, the walls
are polite, and I hold 1/2 a beer in a bottle,
worms and roses and the dead and the living,
sharks flow through. my day has begun:
terrible, even and the
same as yours.

© Frank Silvanski