Evidently, this is the ideal hue in which to
dissipate on the first day of spring, when layers of hot yellow
pollen cover the porch swing. Allergists are everywhere
like sexual sadness and microplastics but hearts must be hard
grey like Gould’s metallic raft. Of course I woke up
from a failed mantra. No birdsong, no Bach when
licking lust’s dust from my forearm. Inseminate
me, I said to the rowdy yellow flotilla. My friends say I’m totally
intellectually promiscuous which is the footnote to being
so empty that intellectual masturbation begins
to fail regularly. On a day without books, my brain
is a Build-A-Bear workshop at the mall and I am
the thing kids are building, the being that needs
to be patched together by small dinosaurs who know
themselves better than the adults who insist
that the dinos are children, which is one way of
owning a mammal to disown the cosmos. No tenor,
no accordion, no peanut sonata. Friends are there
for the remainder in that solo, tangelo polyurethane ear
which is as close as I’ve come to a livable homeland
when I’m being faithful to hues or to heritage.
