Out of the bed springs a rascally devil,
its head a bright red quacking,
its body a burnt blood log,
every flavor of fire mashed together as a bruise

Energy, by the time we know to see it,
embers
And the heat makes the bed pour
away from us, falling like Niagara

Energy, by the time we know to find it,
falls
a vast waste, large enough
to vanish megatons of excrements

Dissolved and distributed
flames on falling water
The bed, by the time we nose to eye it,
spreads all identifying marks thinly throughout

The sun and the sea and the jungle
sand-crabs wearing rain-drop armor
puddles opened to absorb a tear
In the shadow of the jungle
In the shadow of the clouds
On a beach where trails meet
empty shells abandoned by the past
shoes with their plush ankle-supports
the hikers and on their heels came lovers
And the pieces flew into a rage
And the rage calmed and became
The indestructible and the day became so full
One piece of seaweed abandoned by the sea dried
details straining to be located

The bed has been tucked in.
Its rotten-green
Dissolving comforter
Smoothed down into a bubbling

Pot of boiling figments:
Wings of a cockatoo for legs,
Carapace of roach-black plastic
Round a phallic protuberance of ice

Melting from inside
As it tries to saw through
A firewall of red ants
Spilled by a corporate security icon

That is the eye of solar wrath
Like a V for victory with
Cancer pulling E and M from it,
While the skylight of an elite apartment

At the bottom of a frozen sea
Allows a silver light to wander slowly
Spilling a blue vein that flows beneath
The broad back of the prone bed.

The bed becomes a meadow; the meadow is lived-in.
A troll with a green beard of meadow grass
Fills the entire meadow with his face.
His eyes bleed a little bit of blood which is smeared around

And might be mistaken for a coat of flowers.
A blue cloud-brow is wrinkled as if worried thoughts
Float through the meadow
Changing the look of things in ways you can’t figure out by

Sight. When something changes, without
Leaving a mark. When a lack of information becomes
A form of knowledge, all of a sudden, all
By itself . . . It could make a person get religious.

It could make a person feel they
See
Trolls, satyrs, elves.
Religion is when people fail to acknowledge

They’ve put
Themselves
Into
What they’re looking at, Eric thinks.

We are US Americans used to our freedoms.
We use US as a filter through which to understand the world.
We take liberties with liberty: we use it; it uses US.
We are also a smaller group terrified of US, because we don’t feel
like we have a sufficient purchase on what moves US.

We don’t have a sufficient grip on US.
We don’t know if we have a high enough sale-price on US.
We look at US ourselves like a zombie looks at a free person and sees a zombie
like a free person looks at a zombie and sees a zombie. US
is a privilege, an army of privileges, wearing US a mask of rights.

The right mask uses US as a libertine uses a chance,
a chance to engage in liberty with a wild, wild smile for US.
We US admire the unfree as the necessary opposite and
natural extension of US.
We want to extend our freedom into the unfree and become an unfree US,

and then free ourselves like a fountain of US.
Or maybe we just don’t know what it means to be US.
I feel I have been invaded by US,
and trained to feel the way it feels to be a part of US,
and I fully embrace that privilege of feeling US,

so that US can never take me out nor single me out from US.