08-13-2021, 08:21 PM
I.
I.
Nausea of dreamtime.
A shaggy black horse
that I must ride like Dante:
this circle of Hell is a rodeo
and I’m a quaking greenhorn.
but it’s too wild to saddle
so I think I’m saved.
My joy is short lived,
while my wife sleeps
I must babysit another beast:
a hairy pig, shaggy and dark like the horse,
it slips out of every fence I build
out of canned foods and chairs.
A drifter stops to help me pen it
(just across the dirt road
that borders this dream
lies Mexico.
there the pig must not go.)
The drifter alerts me
that the pig has horns.
II.
My wife, our cat and I
prisoners subjected to fiendish breeding experiments
that for some reason lack all terror
though I know we inhabit a Hitler camp
but they resemble the push-up position
described in a sex manual
that a Baptist preacher gave to my brother
just before his marriage.
The cat receives injections.
My wife is worried.
During a quiet walk around a running track
Uncle Adolf assures me
the cat will receive no more injections.
I say to my wife,
“So, we can escape on Saturday.”
I.
Nausea of dreamtime.
A shaggy black horse
that I must ride like Dante:
this circle of Hell is a rodeo
and I’m a quaking greenhorn.
but it’s too wild to saddle
so I think I’m saved.
My joy is short lived,
while my wife sleeps
I must babysit another beast:
a hairy pig, shaggy and dark like the horse,
it slips out of every fence I build
out of canned foods and chairs.
A drifter stops to help me pen it
(just across the dirt road
that borders this dream
lies Mexico.
there the pig must not go.)
The drifter alerts me
that the pig has horns.
II.
My wife, our cat and I
prisoners subjected to fiendish breeding experiments
that for some reason lack all terror
though I know we inhabit a Hitler camp
but they resemble the push-up position
described in a sex manual
that a Baptist preacher gave to my brother
just before his marriage.
The cat receives injections.
My wife is worried.
During a quiet walk around a running track
Uncle Adolf assures me
the cat will receive no more injections.
I say to my wife,
“So, we can escape on Saturday.”