WHAT MAKES ICE AGES?

The man who tore out his throat
and was given a new one
the girl who wanted to be made love to
by a deer
the boy who wanted his torso
to turn into a boiled swordfish
the husband of a wisp of smoke
who wanted to turn into a single tear

the many dark brown mouths,
their bright red kisses
and the small orange and pink cat who wanted
to play on the windowsill, and accomplished this

are all gathered here, in the memory-hole left
by a shotgun blast that echoed for centuries
over ceaselessly chiming cash registers.
Their voices rise with happiness
to greet the commands of a song

the song is catchy, the air is catchy
the pulse of blood catchier and catchier
the vision defeated, the reality exultant,
oyster eyes and oyster tongue
and corriders of off-white library android mind,
with no circuitry wound into the spines of the books
that they slam shut again and again
in the absence of a drumset

waiting for the monks to arrive
with cymbals decorated in pubic bush
waiting for the unimpressed to be impressed
to the point of inevitable heart attack
waiting to be entered in every sagging pore
by a computer

waiting for the campfire in a mop bucket
and magnetic sticks that rearrange
the invisible graffiti on a neighborhood's only glacier
waiting for you and me to shut up
and the universes and multiverses
and houses to go on all without us.