The fool lies flat on the plain. Minutes are decades and decades are seconds and he wilts down to almost nothing—weathered bones, eroded skin, an empty stomach, a stupid grin. This poem once belonged to him: “I felt a gentle emptiness And couldn’t help but smile. The weight of the blanket like a Massive woolly mamoth Absent minded, empty handed, fossilized. Mindful of the hours I have left to nibble, Those nimble dreams, sweet and slippery. I never can remember, I never understand. My broken heart, it will never Mend. The melodrama, it will never End. Send your greetings to the grave and Keep your tepid thoughts at bay. Ask me where, never when, Your broken heart will bravely mend, And thus begins my one small wish— To succumb to nature! Crumble beneath its steel-beam erasure. Like thunder or: lightning unsheathed— Strike my cap and bite the map, holy, Of no use to me. Water, lapping slowly, laughing, hold me. Face down in mud again, Tasting my own blood again, Learning how to drown again, Yearning to be found again, By men who mauled me long ago, In my natural state of vertigo. In the cage I wait: declawed, defanged, but Determined to escape someday My eyes are two acorns and my mouth Is a pit, Filling fast with saliva, spit. Isn’t it strange? To live with this burden; It crawls along the creases of my brain Like worms on pavement in late April rain. They cry out once again: ‘Nausea not again! One more time, More time, One more. Bathroom stall, beige tile, Into the bucket, catching bile, All the while a mother weeps For the boy she loved— He buoys in the sea. Mother, don’t be nauseous for me. Half-digested memories, formless and void, Nullified lives, desperate to tithe, Denting my skin like the oldull knives That glimmered white in a juvenile time Now deep, deep beneath the mattress. Someday, I may exhume, Like the fumes I’ve welcomed in and their Return too nimble, too sin, catch my spit In the tin thimble. Too sweet to stomach, Too slippery to hold, Fall between my fingers a thousand steep miles, I felt a gentle emptiness and couldn’t help but smile.’”