None of these: a snow globe, empty church pews,

cheap coffins, unleavened bread, any kind of amulet,

any kind of anything. Nothing, really. I mean to say nothing.

/

Cut a giant I into a cadaver & pull open the chest just as you would the doors of a church.

Consider how light must travel in waves to shine inside the body, a place it has surely

never been before. Isn’t it vulgar? The particle speed cresting and sinking.

Isn’t it unfair you can’t crawl inside?

Chew a handful of chrysalis. With your tongue & gums,

work the pupa into bolus. Let the musty incantation sour before spitting

the brown back into your hand. Nothing has changed. You are not changed.

Isn’t it painful that you cannot dress yourself in the thing you’ve opened?

For the rest of your life, you will never be a corpse.

Of course you want to hold the knife as it carves the slow & waveless dark.

Of course you want to see all that stuff inside,

all that stuff that is and isn’t yours.

/

As if you haven’t already been reborn a hundred times.

As if, at 30, the lithe body doesn’t stiffen. As if strangers ever

encounter you, the Missouri boy innocent of sex and debt. As if

you won’t wake up tomorrow with four legs, and somebody commanding:

No Bark!