The bed is ugly
In a beautiful rusty way,
As if someone had neglected it,
Had failed to shine it,

Had failed to rub oil on it,
The bed has red hurt patches as if
Skin rash of rust,
How can we rub the red-brown

Rust off?
Will we need sandpaper
hands? The rust has built up like
a skin upon a skin

like a poem where you typed “skin” but
an elderly lady with white hands full of veins
typed “sin”
there goes that poem, icky

now it contains allegories, icky
white hands like cracking paper full of veins
The bed is ugly
In a beautifully rusted way

With all kinds of
Encrustations
As if paint dug into its pores
And thickened and filled up beneath

A teddy bear made of
Lava and raspberry jam,
lukewarm lava,
very hot raspberry jam

Eric cuddles his
little bear, beneath
covers like hoods of lava,
low roof of his cave-bed

The lukewarm lava
has congealed, sealed
ceiling. A teddy bear is
somebody’s heart,

somebody’s heartbeat dropped
from a very hot
place down, chilling under
covers in the low caves of the bed

Heartbeats under
Fur and fuzzy
crises of nostalgia,
sealed heart of lukewarm lava

Who’s heart is it?
If it was yours,
you would know that you had
dropped it, right?

Is it hibernating
in that fur?
It would be terrible
to treat a bear so

emptily,
to take your heart out of it.
Justifiable, yes, but
Poor fuzzy-wuzzy-wuzzy house

poor fuzzy-wuzzy-wuzzy house

“Hello bed,” Eric said.
“You’re a faithful bed.
A little smudged and smeared
But your dirt is good dirt,

Who says dirt is always
Dirty anyway?
I love your good clean dirt,
Which is my skin-cells rubbed

On you to clean myself.”
Having said that, Eric threw
Himself down on the bed
For a nap. As he slept

Sebaceous craters bled raw puss,
Which colonies of skin-eating microorganisms
Sucked up for lunch, and then
Deposit acidic waste in Eric’s pores.

Every pore was a flower-pot
Filled with tiny monsters gardening,
Eating and regurgitating flecks of skin
Reshaped by microbe saliva into

Huts where microbes love to live.
Eric woke and showered; handfuls of
Lavender soap in his pores killed
Many. The busy bed buzzed

Constant invisible industry of Earth

The bed has become a shopping cart
with a bag of brown fruit in it
Eric has to push it, but ice
stuck to the sidewalk shines

The sun has begun to
melt Eric’s body. This morning
when he rubbed the corners of his eyes
crystals of ice like icing sugar

When he blew his nose, ice-crystals
When he brushed his hair, ice-crystals
Eric’s skin is covered by this frost
Except where he cut himself shaving

He has to move his cart
11 blocks, before the wall of ice
forming like a stalled storm-front
solidifies at the corner of Hope and 1st

Hope Avenue
is slippery; the cart goes
any direction, and Eric has no
traction on the sweating sheet of ice

Those who writhend blow
Above the bed
The nippled cherry-blossoms
Release red specks

That pause in a wind-current
Over the gray bed
The color of an office-worker’s shirt
Except for where blown pollen stains

Have been ground in
Have been ground in
Those who writhend blow
The nippled cherry-blossoms

Eric hangs around; he lies around
His life is simple
The color of an office-worker’s shirt
But close your eyes

Those who writhened blow
Above the bend
Release red specks that
Pulse behind the eyelids’ curtain

A mouth full of dirt
pressing through
a shower curtain
a transparent shower curtain

A mouth full of dirt
A soggy face
A soggy life
pressing through

A mouth full of dirt
A transparent shower curtain
A sexual maneuver
A sad transparency of dripping dirt

Soggy dirt
A climax full of soggy dirt
A heartbeat full of dirt
A mouth full of dirt

A transparent shower curtain
liquid dirt
sad dripping rags of dirt
flesh in the form of dirt

flowing in the drain’s
the drain’s direction
Eric was keeping something
perfect in his mouth

like a stone
like a stone in the shape of a word
like a stone in the shape of a word
“ROSE” or “LOVE”

“DIRT”
the stone word dirt
fell apart into soggy
fragments, membranes clogging

full and wet
can’t
drain out

Eric pushed himself up through some layers of snow, some layers of frozen sand, some layers of frozen soil. He put his hands on the sheet of the bed. The sheet was cold, and his hands were hot, so the sheet began to defrost as he touched it, and he found himself looking through it, as if it were a windshield of a moving car. The landscape approaching was so weak that Eric could not believe it could stop his sheet’s motion. And indeed, the sheet demolished the landscape as it sailed through it. The trees fell apart, just at the moment Eric thought that he would die smashed into them, die with his flesh jumbled into tree-flesh. The trees fell apart into matches the color of salmon in the earliest light. The sky felt apart into wet flakes of morning, each one thick like a sponge, like a loaf of air thickened by sunlight soaking into it. The weak light of earliest morning soaked into landscape but failed to make it real enough to stop Eric and his sheet. Eventually, he traveled through it all, the orchards, the clouds, the houses made of off-white paper, the air full of bridal soot. He arrived in a place with nothing but summer light and rising dust. The light went deep into him and he wasn’t frozen anymore. And the soot rose up around him and cut the light in half, in half again, in half again, in half and in half and in half until the only light left was coming from inside of Eric’s mouth, from the place in him that remembered the taste of light. And something fell out of Eric’s face, something that gave off light. It was a little blue bed, hand-sized. It was blue and white as if it had been squeezed from a tube of frosting to celebrate the birth of some tiny lucky angel who would curl up inside it and close his eyes, looking so unreal, serene and simplified, as though squeezed from a tube of frosting his sweet self.