Solomon stays home
that morning
I woke
with a sore throat
and a waking fever
so I called in sick
took a steam bath
with the wives
they talked about
dyes and textiles
and I watched them
dress in the vapors
woven and painted
by their chatter
swift silken shrouds
with golden lining
brushed against
my perspiring skin
as I lay terrified
on the icy marble
among titans who
gave each other birth
and the only sentence
I passed that day
I passed on to myself
something lit the undertow
she moves
from fear of stillness
and lightning strikes in her wake
singes the pillows burns another
lover to a wiry wisp
on the playground
metal tubes rebound her electricity
refuse to spill their shuttling juices
and peer inside themselves for
Morse memories of an exile under
the rubble when she last exited
their atoms and left them piercing
the air with leaden daggers
I surrounded them: a symphony
1/3
it happens when I play alive and sing under the enemy's shower
put on kitsch as a bowler hat, fall in love with a VJ's lower lip --
they call it groove because the needle slides without friction
2/3
I shop along the yellow isles for shortening of the path each box
is a Fukuyama full-stop brought to me by the United Artists
of Sinai freshly plucked from the bush at the end of history
3/3
I have nine happinesses under the kitchen sink and many more
in the freezer; they keep me unsoiled and stretched on the plastic
meadows of Dystopia where angels pluck their faltering wings
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