It can be a final dairy product or the first step
in cheesemaking. Regardless, it will be something
really great. I have given you the gift of shells, for I have no money,
only the forsaken world. My roommate’s a mess, fermenting
smog in Ziplocs, assimilating 12 eggs into a lonely fried egg.
I look the other way, crouch in my nest, a rat. But look at me
and I look back – an ancient telegraph
of psychic attacks. At the Trade Center,
a surveillance amulet of polyethylene to keep me.
I write my feelings in transparent glue. It’s like a new
invisible ink! Mother invented me out of her tissue.
In the dream, a face
dreamed out of a face
we’ve already seen. It’s a lot like yours
but a cubist prism — you catch the light to break it.
We raise the wheat to reap it. We mill the germ
to eat it: Wonderbread! Whole metroplexes
built on this, procession of the seed,
a little protein cloaked in fat. We live
in a society barbed-wired
by Aramark. But no need
to fret; what makes a poem epic
is its epicness, not its elements
of heroism, narrative, or length.
Fish cry for the horizon. With their tears
they make the ocean.