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!

In a factory where they make chloramphenicol
          cats          loiter

one—gnarled
          like a woodblock: waterlogged, barnacled
another—thin with an elongated tongue—
          a fireman’s hook
and the third—huge like a calm
          in the Persian Gulf

Navigating on roller-skates in the dark, I understand:
the country around me vibrates.
The spider’s mute web
reflects an equilateral slumber. Both Satan
and a cobra next to him would seem pusillanimous, two schlimazels.
On the other side of the glass, the spider is quieter
          than my phone in Basel.

Flaring in epithelial darkness, as if bitten
by a rabid, magnetic gesture—
all at once—body, converted to hydrogen
all at once—hydrogen under pressure.

Magnetic pressures, within and without,
the bear hibernates in a lush’s cranium.
When the room starts to spin, the bear rushes out
and deposits itself for a glass of uranium.