Two Poems

STATEMENT OF WORK   I am sick and ill equipped for womanhood, Sheila, its rickety basket bouncing on the front of me. I wish you’d give me the haircut of a woman, Sheila, demote the red florets tanning my skin and kiss the pock I disappear in at parties and in the company of well-coiffed men. Fuck ’em. Their gastronomical beet tops and the women who love them, vulgarly replete with the secrets of better sex from the neck up. The mouth of my desire is foaming, Sheila. What is a lady like? How does her mouth justify fullness when it’s all she can do not to yawn and drop it? Her moves proper. If I can’t navigate my kind, am I lost to the flock? Can a doctor diagnose my petal walk and say, you were pre-pubescent too long. And what about decency! There’s something I’d prefer in all caps on my CV but how with this head, a neat trick of cannibalism, massacres in miniature, my grin thin through from each terrible question of marriage. I am heavy with horns and rain barrels. The last way to admit I exist is to wave across the avenue at some soup-spoon shadow in storefronts. Enough questions to kill a ficus. Is weight all existential, Sheila? Who will compose the haunted song of longing to now what? And where is my mother in this roundabout reach-around to the word cock? Oh god, I’ve killed this and every heel in every sock I have ever worn. I’ve worn through to something sharper and it still does not feel like I’m there.   NON SE IPSE   —adj., Latin: Not oneself as a result of intoxication Be more cautious. 4th floor walk up. Walk out, hospiced. Bring a hip flask and a black flash smile of cast iron. Bus pass. Cross walk the grit to a white fibre. Nerves calmed, red a’slosh, bottled. The city winds a minus through all transit, traffic melted to an orange block. Right there. Stop it. Imagine the place into a brass church. A bar bent as a French horn where flocks of poets graze on the pure grain vodka of a blood-lit bulb. Edison. Sell your soul for a draping prayer plant’s slant way of growth. Is the nighttime miked for your crowing, for the sound of the glass as it swallows your head in its mouth? Bus kneels. Bloor St. Queen flush with the pink tickets of a dozen messy returns, a dozen proposals of equivalent weight. Your girlish kick of snark-sharp skates and the gloss of a hospital bangle. Fresh wrapped. Travel is a bag you’ve carried across its own border, wholly uncertain where you have been, who took your blood, who kissed the ring. The city a fickle excitement you’re firing in, cracker jack, slow dance of a velvet dress schlepping your next best ass back to the booth to surprise all those who figured you’d died by the heft of your robes. Gold koi in your left eye rising to rear its fringed scales against a simple black pond where stunned, flat faces flare into clarity.