AS IF

there would be these purrs
as if of food trucks carrying
the wheel of death
betty white is still strapped to
it screaming as though at a
hilarious joke blemish-free
yet picket-fenced with silver
blades a cloth draped over
her in the back of the truck
this purr as if of the liquored
heart of a cloud object a black
devil’s crunching hip socket
the fuzzy procrastination at
the core of the underdog’s pillow

for the moment we all saw
steven tyler’s bottom lip covered
in thumb tacks an expression as
if raped in jail stepping down
from the solar expressway and
other life-threatening dangers
lashed together

the cigar of the talent agency’s
round bottom puffing snapshots
of trauma a kardashian home-coming
dance plaguing his knees viscera
with the suffocation as if of
a fridge

but this knife-thrower is a mega-
celebrity in his own right: you
hear only the lonely spirally
laments of whale song when
he hangs up the phone to your
birthday party requests you’ve
gone from a respectable father
who wants to seem cool by
inviting him to a dotard burping
natural gas with a lighter in
front of his mouth for
the rest of the afternoon –

and then your stupid rain dance
calling down a grim white sheet
from heaven with an oily fringe
and dappled here and there as if with
a few drops of blood