A Million Futures of Late

There’ll be no town- going today;
I’ll be wind- rattled and listen
to the window’s answering racket.
I’ll watch flies manifest from glass
rub the runt and ruthlessness off.
I’ll have my lapses into slapsticks
of accent and stutter, girl and mother.
Today, flies will spin a crown of woozy cartoon stars for me.
I’ll roll my eyes back thinking;
I’ll be the picture of flightiness today.
Assumptions will spill from my ears —
a brain storming out in furious herds;
all summer my brain will be a pasture
of tall, hissing grass, sibilance intent on rising to character air.

Fly forgeries of z wallpaper in my room: chainsaws, prop planes,
wind forcing itself through. It’s a fact that the skull makes room for
the brain by talking; the brain shakes from a curse in the cranium
as something dark crawls out of my mouth. The radio is pouring
weather I must knit into a shawl. Evenings require a shawl and the
wrong love, the wrong noise of one’s wrong thinking. Flies come
to the brain every last inkling into swarm, into arias of amnesia
and treble thoughts. No one can shoot something that small.

I’ll just shoot off today; I will
blurt out argot in the rawest haze.
I’ll be snoring at the kitchen table
while the radio slips into passing traffic.
I will be sworn by. I’ll be clairvoyant
by keeping half in the dark. I’ll know
apropos out- posts by staying home today;
by haunting my own enlarged attic
under worried clocks drum- humming
me down to make me one of their vernaculars —believe me,
black hole, you bright microscopia,
you know best how long I’ll stand
stitching up grass- stained synapses
in devotion to invisible demands, whatever the invisibles
demand.