Empathy Lacks Postage And Can’t Be E-Mailed As An Attachment

I thought no one listened,
but I heard about a letter which had yet to reach me.

Who was I?
Clay. Bone-marrow. Pin-point of ink.

I didn’t think of myself as a hairdo,
a tie longer than the Mississippi, and rhetoric against
rapscallions scooping free Prozac into cadaverous jaws.

If I could sniff the letter, such prescience
of parking fines, hang-overs, asbestos, rust.

I tremble like
jungle canopies before the boom of Napalm.

The letter I imagined: an answer,
like the engine locking, smoking, screeching,
after the oil has burned to pure heat.

But letter doesn’t flick into my hands.

Why do the clouds stutter?!

I await the letter which has yet to be written, signed
with a signature as flowery as a Alabaman’s evening greetings,
his cheeks red, his jowls jubilant, and a white
kerchief in his right fist, as he wipes sweat from brow.

I await the letter whose author
surely over-estimated me,
because he would address me as Dear Sir,
and by the time the mail reaches my box,
Miss Evening,
whose gnarled fingers scratching at my bald pate,
making sure it glistens free
of pigeon shit, gnashed spiders,
She, who cackles phlegm,
that Spinster Aunt, will make certain
my forehead & scalp pave a highway where
the drivers will pass a shack by a yucca and chaparral field,
and a moon-pale boy, his head
resting in his hands,
elbows resting on window ledge.

The letter would contain the code to a safe containing Autumn’s toxin in a vial.
The letter would dragonfly, stray-dog, jitterbug, and then spontaneous-combust.
The letter, lattice of sadness, acrid chocolate, & green vomit deemed as cough syrup.
The letter, no private cognac for the suit and tie, but universal sludge.
The letter, a transcript of telephone sex between monkey & shoe-horn.
The letter, the map for the minotaur, so he may—at last!—
escape from the labyrinth shaped like a pile of filthy sneaker laces,
then pose for the cameras at the threshold’s opening while tipping a top hat.
The letter, a chair painted red,
empty, in the middle of a chamber 10,000 leagues beneath the sea.
The letter, combustive sugar.
The letter, cupola-styled architecture as a form of dysentery.
The letter, dictated in the language of tar, collision of asteroids, suicide by Disney,
blackboards cluttered with the algebra of moths, coupons for canned chili.
The letter, what’s swept under the garage.
What simmers in the millionaire’s private safe.
Gunpowder in a moll’s mascara.
Machineguns mistaken for lightning-rods,
when the tender marionettes of meat waltzed before their aim.

The letter would prove
a fitting cornerstone to shattered store windows,
beets boiled, stuffed with shit then fed to the Kittens of Holy Charity,
leather sandals dipped in goat’s broth, and served to Bankers as amuse-bouche,
while the owners of leather sandals sniff deposits of plastic jerky for nutrients,
and send money-grams charged with the energy
of owls perched on coffins, or strippers hooked
to antidepressants, or cheerleaders
licking the chilly urinals of high school distinction.

But no letter will reach me.

No arsenic blooms in my left eye. No
cactus asks the clouds why they pour vultures, no
mercurochrome for the sun’s gash on its right cheek, no
boxing-gloves for a petal who once wielded a tequila bottle.

I can’t swallow this without vomiting;
not taxicabs, nor OxyContin, nor candles lit following the repast of chicken’s fat
nor pure Mondays near the blue tongue of seagulls,
will pull me up through the toxins drifting above my parking lot,
those zeppelins of brownness woven thick as sweaters for the Dakotas.

Give me the grace,
O Expanse of Dark Matter & Isolate Flecks of Helium,
to be no more a martyr than the mountain lion
rifled for encroaching upon a Millionaire’s estate in the hills,
or the arrow-riddled Saint whose
agile body writhed in the shape of sensuous flames
as he sank, arrow-riddled,
basted with agony,
down the mastiff pole of punishment.