we can stay here in this cardboard hotel and hope
the flood comes just in time to catch the fire
we can stay here and watch the river through the wall

we can turn our two into a snake
that nimbly cleans itself
we can see the fire and the water coming together

we can stay outside so many events
we can see a path out of the world

we can stay here in this cardboard hotel and hope
grandmothers and grander fathers
stay alive long enough to cry us back to sleep
when the cities melt

we can rent a room in a tidal wave
and keep it upright as it rushes into towns
where we once lived miserably
we can hear the music all become young again

put moons back into canyons
pull planets that are jagged
out of a rough place made smooth

we can stay in this hotel while the other hotels
slam their boards together and say
to the wind how sorry they are

we can drive our room through every other room
until all the passengers of things that stand still
let their fingerprints make love to one another

you make homes for me in myself with your tongue
kitchen erupting from stall showers
a cook in the ceiling banging pots against
electrified grid of sky

you made a home for me under
a tiny field
that stretched under foot-thumped blocks
but held out their rhythm
with a kiss in the soil
with five hands inside each finger
you hollowed out the places that I would need
to be empty when the world began to fill me up

you make a movie using my eyes
you mount them on a tripod of flower stalks
the air with its shivers a movie of unseen dust
with my eyes you make a movie
and we're mounted on a tripod that's your body with one
limb impossibly holding the top of my head
to keep it from falling off into the final scene

you want the title page of your life
to be walked upon by many kittens
I want the same thing
we like it when our names blur
hard lonely antennas go soft
wrap around one another

you have fur in all the right places
I trim mine to fit into the places where you are bare
you want the title page of your life
to be put into a toaster next to the title page of my life
to let them burn together in their separate slots

you want the marquee to carry your wordlessness
the inside of a beetle's shell
to bring under its shiny hard
your meaning to a place where it'll
slowly be appreciated by lizards

I want the same thing but not now
I'm too busy chafing
your eyelids with my eyelids
too busy in your heat with the things
that have previously made me cold

I watch that man carefully
who runs with his loud happiness
through a big grassy field full of robots standing still
flicking their switches--their switches
are on their backs, halfway
down their spines--into the OFF position
while cackling wildly, with his smooth haircut
never moving. I watch him carefully,
but I can't figure out his operation
or why he controls so much. And I can't understand
why this thin bubble of glass just in front of me
stops me from smashing into his movements,
from finding out if there is something in him
that one could make love to, something that might
justify the proudest country in the world
for giving birth to him.
The thin glass looks like it's being hammered
by more than one sun, but it throws so much back
that the one striking it seems to be turning
into a grey suckermouth. The robots are marching in rows
towards each other now, there are red propellers
coming out of their wrists. They don't seem ready to do battle.
Their affable master shuts them off again and they totter
into one another and fold up into crude ovals,
limbless as a heap of tight-closed clams.
I can only watch and eat my insides while that smooth man
laughs at the joys of his authority,
but the grass begins to feel good on my urine-coated thighs
and presently the glass bulb begins to give me the intensity
of reflected light, and it puts a soft throb in my forehead
like sex after a lunch of fruit and cheese,
and I go to sleep thinking I might wake up with a weapon
or an abandoned world.
And I feel, between worlds, a switch in my back
that was broken by too hard a flicker of a boss hand,
and now connects to its circuits only once in a while,
at terrible moments that are peaceful for others.

I know a girl who spends days in her kitchen
looking through the holes in her cheese shredder
when she looks through the shredder
all the squirrels eating birdseed in her front yard
turn into dinosaurs with nasty mouths
little predators with scaly skin
trampling the tomato plants

through each different hole in the cheese shredder
she sees different kinds of animals
sometimes the animals are mating
sometimes they are petite foxes in bisexual tuxedos
sometimes they are primitive humans who bang
on her window to beg for food
lazy cavemen who are intrigued
by her toasters and microwave ovens

every day she feels the planet
turn to a ball of hot liquid metal
under her feet

it doesn't burn anymore

strangely, it doesn't even feel hot anymore
but it turns and it turns
into something inhuman and huge
and has a silver radiance
that makes the stars cower

she walks around on it waving her hands in thick smoggy air
the cities have all burned down without a scream
her high heels turn the surface solid everywhere they touch
she doesn't know why she is unharmed
but the world is very pretty
undulating gently liquid metal

there aren't any mailboxes in the bright monotony
but she doesn't mind
the eyes who read those nervous words
are all gone under a sea of steaming silver
and soon the steam will disintegrate
suns will greet her in their purity
blue will cease to exist
and she will keep walking into whatever's left