Chaos Non Sequiturs

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Pour soft drinks into the ground and watch a forest of butterfly wings

descend—understory of veins and dust,

canopy torrential with scales, black and orange.

If only we could scale the topography of insomnia

with this sound, feel the beating wings prune the corollas petal-less,

the galaxies of calyxes wind-breached. Light reaches into each movement

and pulls out nectar. Silk button. Chrysalis. Sleep—

gourd from which tides pour. Each eddying leaf is a typhoon

sent to choke archipelagos into ghost cities. Over a town

that refused to drown, the sun and the moon seesaw.

Beside the playground, the girl who summons monsoons from us

with her eyelids twists the pull tab off a pop can

and flicks it into a field of puzzle grass.

By the three-rail fence, we were boys,

our passports to manhood stamped with a grass-stained savagery.

We once wove a cat o’ nine tails out of cattail

and whipped a snapping turtle for three hours until we dropped it

across his carapace. When I reached, he beaked a canyon

into my pinkie. In our classroom, you could spin the globe

and halt it with your fingertips—the hands we dug into continents,

the countries wriggling as if worms under pins,

our incontinent unconscious—we conjure new histories

to our palms. The besieged siege back. An eyelash falls.

Tuesday, July 15, 2014