While drinking PBR at Champs West I think about the woman who used my heart as a tampon and pray that she wakes up with a tail…

And fur-like hair caking her entire body, making little grunting sounds
Looking like something Jane Goodall would present
On the National Geographic channel
offering high-lilted ooga-oogas to
Her boyfriend with the short hair and the trust-fund
Who I once saw in this very bar talking about
His fantasy football team while drinking Bud Light
To a bartender who was forced to assent and nod.
How funny it would be, if she would de-evolve
Before his very eyes. How the sensory apparatus
Failed campaign buttons below her forehead would
Bulge and then weld together like
Rosary beads flattened on a railroad track
Her limbs enveloping
Into their respective sockets dripping in a sleet of
Some unnamed scientific protoplasmic slime with
gills bristling below her chin
dual treble-clef signs to an unnamed symphony of loss
so that the creature I once adorned with feathers and a halo now
Resembles the aquatic protagonist of the anthologized Elizabeth Bishop poem
We were coerced to memorize in sixth grade
I think about all this:
A 90’s version of Kafka who awakes one morning and finds himself metamorphed into a genital crab
The cool philosophy prof. at Bradley who swung his fist like a gavel
As he adamantly insisted that there were more stars in the photographed universe than mcdonalds has sold hamburgers.
The woman who fires me text after text, elle-oh-eeling and chirps out “I know, right?” every time she concurs with me as if she is programmed by Avon Barbie.
How the little emerald bar the local newspaper described had “prosaic”
piping was Stafford’s dairy growing up and how I wrote in my blog
that it looks like, “ the vacuous interior to a box of menthol cigarettes, crushed and stranded in the back room of a porn shop at the end of time,”
as the slushy fizz emanates from the yawping lid of the aluminum silo
the simple can with the blue-patch that looks like it just received
first place in the fecund sow division at a local 4-h fair. How life is a process of adaptation
How I’ve
more than likely been inside another person or written a bad-check or drank a quart of expired milk
with the date containing the
imprisoned calendar square numerals of the day that shall be etched
into the marble brow arched above the pitching mound of my remains come only half-a-century time and
How four-hundred million years ago my ancestors looked exactly like my ex-girlfriend does now
A slug shaped chordate, a bookmark to NAKED LUNCH doused in a vat of urine
From a failed drug test, with the tail-vertebrae still over three million years from stiffing, and rising
Stretching itself out from a glucose pottage of microscopic grease
Patiently, waiting raising her hand in the back of the classroom to a question
No one will ask or know the answer to for a another
hundred million years.