The image of home: A rape victim’s on-screen shadow portraying the ghost of an extremity’s entry. Clutching a cup full of scars, who thought to copy every last corpse with a machete’s Xerox machine? I don’t know, but the toner’s getting low. Already you got a crowd of cadavers gathered around the abandoned commandments you’ve branded necessary to happiness, but it seems the standing ovation’s defective. My shrink thought I was bipolar but three therapy sessions revealed I was just overly objective, still I don’t feel so eclectic. My tie-dyed psyche’s skydiving over the burning wreckage of it must be separation anxiety from fire-hydrant piety, but finally soaked in spinal fluid—concluded cure to makeshift contagion, constellation in stasis. Fixed like stars where patience is a landmark and we’re too anxious to pull over the car and park. That was almost a close call, albeit still too far to crawl when my lungs stall in a Parliament pitfall, slumped breath with lit cigarettes in the same fireproof pocket as my asthma pump. New motto: Drink up the loss of life’s lotto. Help our burning homes race all this alcohol to empty bottles…

Here’s where families can strap their burning homes into the back seats of their SUV’s, roll down their windows and lean into the intercom for an order of oxygen masks and plastic yellow hats full of water so when the children put them on it won’t be too late…

The next thing I knew was the last thing I remember: The short story of a photograph that’s already been painted. I play Tetris when I have writer’s block, inserting bricks like memory cards into walls that’ve forgotten where we live, already what we’ve built. Now isn’t this the epitome of epitaph? Tombstone City’s a histogram, tally the dead with charts and graphs. I even carved these sneakers from my own calves like infant-leather skin grafts rather than bare-footing over the coals. Woven fire hose through the hole in my tongue, looping around the barbell it lifts to keep my language in shape. Take two sides and call me if there’s a choice to make. See, I’m borderline whole-other-country, but split screens don’t exactly focus on the big picture. So, we only point to things we don’t need—I’m still poor, so I’m on what fast-food flames feed but, possibly, rich people have a brush for each one of their teeth. And, if that’s not why you never hear about dogs having cavities, then what the fuck’s so routine about comedy? There’s no telling how much a scale weighs without another one. Pump sun, overdose. Like Miles muting his trumpet I hold a magnifying glass to the end of this fire hose…

Here’s where families can strap their burning homes into the back seats of their SUV’s, roll down their windows and lean into the intercom for an order of oxygen masks and plastic yellow hats full of water so when the children put them on it won’t be too late…