A Jugendstil tower. Myself quite new.
I heard the underbell flowers uncurl.

You were sitting on the little staircase. By all accounts, a pearl.
I stiffened. Limits were measured.

You were the sum of all you encountered,
become what you could not deter.

We were joined by the ladies’ confessor (and connoisseur),
self-absorbed as a Klein jug.

Perched on one foot, latching a sandal.
First I see an olive tree—and then the magnetic tree.
Orbits of objects, carefully balanced.
Flick the pupil and, as if by prayer, a lizard is vanquished.

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!

The hedgehog extracts the root of the sky – a dark prophet
shouldering the full weight of Sebastian’s body.

The hedgehog has trickled out of a sieve – its back is
at odds with itself, so meticulously plural.