My Therapist Has a Therapist Who Has a Therapist Who Has a Therapist and They’ve All Seen Me

There will be no pity, no ruth, no solace for the sweltering
caravan of months
that, there again, Mr. Monster, Little Cracker Boy, Lysus
Naturae, you will miscount for the few pink slips

of weeks–where beneath some crooked Lullaby’s sway,
on a thick
carpet cut of red
melton cloth, you sat in a defensive crouch

& so did your stolid best
to brace for the torpedoing drumroll
of curtain-falls as they might have fallen

upon stage to your own troubles–what now counts
for a never-
ending spool of invent-me-nots.

2

At first the orchestra warming up, playing a soft spring
rain of scales
as the Devil takes stage, licking
a few houseflies off his buttery waffle cone of cream.

The dripping pink-rosé to orange-sorbet peeling
off his satin cuff
like the vulchered-[sic]
dawn-til-dusk of Hiroshima.

3

I think of Leibniz’s We should not have to break our heads,
break our heads as much as is necessary,
as the brain licks off some steam and openly stews,
openly stews through the concave eyepiece,

which Galileo Galilei gaped through in a crumbling observatory
overlooking some black neck of wood,
finding that, regrettably, the animals on the moon
remained invisible,

that–mise en abyme–reason perched somewhere invisible
was always waylaid,
waylaid by the mind’s more absolute,
and bountiful appetite,

which bending in & out of proportion, enlarges and diminishes
whatever it befuddles,
focusing “on the wrong things,
or the right things in the wrong portions.”

4

The hooked fly, the rigged worm was a little world,
a little world wobbling; distortedly bobbing
like ‘so what!’–at the rod’s tip
before entering “the dark hole of the head.”

5

Once the humiliation of “behind bars at the zoo”
came to mean nothing
I didn’t already
know

by Deputy Sheriff twice fold, being driven
from Asheville to Raleigh,
from Asheville to Raleigh,
from Asheville to Raleigh

for another stint at name the color that comes to mind
as the mind pecks
at the hollow sound to its own
bleating skull; and so where are we now?

My therapist has a therapist who has a therapist who has a therapist
and they’ve all seen me, said the Devil
the night the fairy princess exchanged my sad tooth
for the tail of a poisoned rat.

6

I put it on a hook
and so watched
it worm & wriggle

like the little world
I was about
to cast out,

to cast out, to cast
out, to cast out
like John the Baptist

or Jesus himself,
tossing hogs
into the sea.

7

“God Bless, America?”
A phrase that today
Is like blessing
The Devil, himself.

8

The world looks at me as if it were I
who begat crow,
who begat the eye

who begat the blind
who begat the bloody-curl
that in the beginning was scream.

9

“I suppose it’s that end of time again,”
said the nail to the hungry lid
of a coffin, who was stuffing
itself with a Cardinal’s

wounded half hanging out

10

There will be no period.