A jackal and a crow. Blood neither shed nor shared
between them. The dynamite, nearby, is armed.
They are barely contours, prepared
to escape the kernel of blackness and assume a rudimentary form.

Above them, thought balloons are floating. The cartoon repaginates
the seashore, windy, dry as bone.
When the rain falls, it becomes clear the photographer, buried to his waist,
was welded of bronze and focused on no one.

Halfway into the journey – just puncture me with a compass.
Zero-kilometer, where fabled rivers converge, reversing polarity: drain.
Suppose it a tunnel, at once the air is set tight as a lattice.
Hurray! You are launched from the maw of a soil-based yawn.

Hangnail, dangled all the way down to the switchflow entrails,
there to consult the register: vapors, extralarge rock, and the coiled bands.
You unfasten your jaw at the plywood façade like a conscript,
oil, the armed, double-barreled ram turns the corner: en garde!

Maybe you do draw
                seriously,
but not now, alas! Lines
form a grill,
and behind it—lions.

Lions. Their life is a diplomat’s,
they pose on their paws, their heads double.
With celerity of computer chess,
lions occupy cells with each cell.

A betty’s mouth rotates. The wind’s proof doubles.
Mesmerizing Boeings. The cyclopic reveries
of stadiums. And America doubles
over and b/pounces—all are pleased