Once I ate myself, it’s an excellent end to the road of excess,
and if I can be frank, there was a tremendous feeling of spaciousness,
like hitting a baseball so hard it sails over the fence, oh,
you know it from the wood in your hands and you’re running with
nowhere to go because you’re already as good as home.
Once I went to my real home, and my thick and real parents,
smelling of their bodies’ tender, easy decay, were seen as
contained within their separate soliloquies, like paper boats
caught in the eddy of a rain-filled gutter.
Once I traveled in a car across a desert thought to be beautiful
because it was thought to be beautiful. Come to think of it, it may have been beautiful,
studded in the twilight with low and twisting cacti and framed between
two hills that stretched to our various attendant planets.
Once I thought of my wife with my wife right there, her sex purring,
and the night-blooming blossoms irresistible in their function.
Once I was flush against the wall as if to move from that
would be to separate from my own body, and the day
would rush in and make of me what time makes of everything.
And once I decided to stop not opening,
and birds with red chests continued pecking,
and children’s balloons remained at the exact and necessary tension,
and I was revealed to be where I happened to be, in this case,
the left kitchen sink, squeezed between a Royal Poodle,
an Englishman cut out of his will, a woman with surgically
repaired menisci, my own son flaunting his ownness,
and my whirlwind wife, her back to me, but now, that back a front,
that front a plunge, that plunge just enough to lightly slip from
the relentless going as if somewhere, just the running water and the smell of
cut mangoes, and the same history as it’s always been, caught up with itself
once more, all once’d and why not? We’re already as good as home.
