*Apoptosis Today, Odysseus!*

“A life in the postal system
is not a life worth living,”
said the man in the postal system.
The stars are many. Come
address them, then dress them
before they turn cold.
They should wear sewing machines
made from clothes mailed from China.
My lover's vagina is an envelope
and my penis has been mailed
back to my brain. It’s a new form
of cell suicide, just another way
to be mailed to the cross. One head
crawls into another, two and then one,
imprisoned inside a program
of sad returns post-marked
direct mail marketing,
fragmentation of the nucleus, sad clowns,
a warm feeling when she seals your flap.
I want to leave again.

Dead Hand

We started by dividing the universe
into what can and cannot be named.
Me, and everything else. And
Everything happened, especially you
who believed - to a fault - the shamed
distortions of our personal spaces.

The dictionary was one of them,
once completed, and eventually worn soft by the words
we read most: Is now broke.
We fucked a bit to keep it coming,
but what? I’m not sure.
- Me neither.

On the weekends, or occasionally
after work if the mood was gamey,
I’d chase old untellable things
that we’d failed to define or crammed
into small pronouns that meant little.

Hard work,
considering the ethereal ambitions
of what moved us back then, and now backwards
towards nothing. I never found anything,
but was glad to not come home.

All at once tired - smoked and stalked by the hunted
I curled up and slept in the dead hand
of a body of what that wept,
but would never be living.

*Sunday night vigil*

During the night, a cold rain pours.

A light, on the third floor
of the fifth apartment, dims.

A gray bus drives by
with no one at the wheel.

A shadowy figure in a hood
leans against the seventh window.

The water runs down the street
into a hole and stops.