Close as Kin

Every vision someone summons
ashames the present,
though remarks vividly on the self,
on the can’t-speak-of.

They have had one thousand dreams.
They have dog-paddled in them.
They have them, eating through,
dreams as by nightly post,
suffocating, ginger, inlaid with
flickering thoughts
and freely tucked in.

They have them, every vision,
clustered like kernels,
festered in close as kin
to the cobb.

We have had one thousand dreams,
too soon twisted like tumblers in a lock.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Animal Snouts

Our faunatic people format decisions
on their appearance through adolescence,
pubertal to prime, that span
where animals are ugliest,
long faces, unadjusted mouths,
heaved noses, ferrous eyebrows,
all the acne of life.

I decided my outward aspects bad
at seventeen, without checking
for a decade, only to discover
one morning from a shower
that I was one nudge past fair
one fourth of each day.

I’ve greeted so many that considered
their portions handsome or pretty
that were neither, or that quickly concluded
their face a frank hideousness
that was not, so many in flight,
people like wild, bursting tanagers,
and now I can’t hear them
for talking talking talking,
and am quite behind the times.