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Around a Siren's Armor

We played in mud togas
black water at the foot of a factory
leaf hands slapping the current
pages for a symphony open wide
the imprint of an upturned mouth
on the plateglass of an ice cream shop
three steps from inch-mapped train tracks
milk churning crystals at work
in a fountain up the left leg to the right hand heart
everything jagged for learned love
to foam over the bridge
and burst the blueprint tunnels
with swollen meter needles in the chemical night
where nobody swears in my language
we rubbed newsprint from our chestbones
with a soft blade's knife
and let the cables exercise
the battered light one last time

before the axe on the switch
and the torch in a huge basement
eating cars while our leather and money
frisked a magnet cone out of dry air
sprayed viscera fine into heaven
and shut ruby light
in the stem's door
of a vagrant blueberry
next to its cousins the cobalt pebbles
skyscraper come to the eagle's foot
where it pins a pair of overalls
once the greased sex of a paid worker
to lie down in torment cardboard
and wake on the dock with a hospital soul
a body fizzed empty for weekdays
split open on calendar ends
when it walks bridges in twos and threes

Where it watches from sky's eaves
parchments of yard cut ragged
low green bright gold
against darkened sections of forest
the pink and violet planets are lining up
all a solar system's heat
and still your lips are frosted
a man with a large bulb lit helmet of head
picks his wife in melted scarves
from an ancient hammock
antique plastic rope tattooed twine
on her body of bodies
he turns to the twilight socket again and again
never carries a kitchen and bedroom glacier
severed horns of ram and wet blacksoil
arteries toward
the vented underlip of a mushroom cloud's
simulacrum fertilized by the doubt of death
and the gripless life we lived
in its mechanized shadow.