In the morning I wake like taxidermy.
Like I’m born on my birthday,
all foam footed,
hugged in hide,
navelless and novel.

Bearing my chicken neck to the people and their human picked pockets.
Cold blooded, warm blooded,
beige blooded hourglass.
Shook up by tantrumed hands.
Stood in sandy sandals on sanded steps,
growing a calloused ground on eggshelled feet.

Toddler drawn curtains over my human hindsight.
A vampiric tendency to avoid the hissy fitted sun.
Its firmenting nature—
a parasite light, out to put a side to symbiosis.
Reveal the sidewalk cracks,
break my mother’s back
and sprout purple-flowered weeds of superstition from it.

But the sun is out.
Only out to spoil the ignorance of bliss.
Turn my apple pulped corneas to wine,
send its stains sprinting out my nose.
Cross my eyes with the sight of it.
Ill behaved as a tongue chasing its tip.

An ancient offer.
A tongue for a tongue.
Not for an eye, not for I.
Not for a mouse in the stomach of reptilian shame,
stretched too thick against thin walls,
snakey tastes of its naked tail.

Not for elephants in ivory rooms,
not even elephants in elephant rooms.
Not for owls who ask why.
Not for lizardly love basked on smashed tortoise shell steps.
Always the case.
But not, but never for the cannibal animals.

A vulture’s talloned talent in waiting.
In line for a hopscotch drawn on my blistered back.
Lying on the trampoline floor,
barking up this tree trunk torso.
Twisted ankles crutched on the enemy’s armpit.
Caught by the smell of orange ****,
skin of yellow teeth.
Caught in acts.

Today I woke on the morning’s wall.
Sighted and sensed and stuffed.
Suited in ill-suited skin.
Colon full of semi colons,
breathing a furnaced breath.

Petted flatly with the day’s open hand.
Like the first touch of petroleum,
the health of the dead
pumped out of this crude cruel invention.
Softly, mechanically drooled about.
Today I woke,
unpreserved.