rudderless brigantine, ghost-captained,
     rotting figurehead and sails in shreds,

plague ship of the sidewalk heaving to
     through dawns as red as emergency flares,

not on the meds that would quiet her disquiet,
     happy as a bat in dazzling sun,

mind a file of cartoon cells, a buck for coffee
     buys you eye contact, a glance as quick and painful

as two cats mating, otherwise her face
     a half-sucked lollipop dropped in sand,

her purpose that of a dad at the zoo dragged by kids
     to see some beast he’s never heard of,

pulls down her pants, pisses in a doorway,     
     on a vector betwixt unselfconscious and unconscious,

unknowable, unnameable, once a bride
     in a photograph in an album in a landfill,

as perfect that day in her wedding dress
     as a motorcycle in a showroom,

fingers in a cake as sweet as hyperglycemic blood
     and whiter than the grace she finds in REM sleep

on a bed of truck rims, now waits for morning
     and its herald, whose bile-spattered bugle

is loud enough to wake her but pitched too low
     to shatter your abject mindset,  

one that says we get what we deserve,
     that it isn’t bullshit luck

that puts us in our freshly laundered socks.

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