Simplify the Universe with a Pie Chart

Daily, daily scathing roughens the psyche

and veils are unhinged. I too was a planet,

planed and waterless. Wolf-roved. Our roofs

leaked, mischievous sisters locked the Mother General

out in the garth where she prayed to the Foundress

and the dead and the living looked on, entombed

and disapproving. Gray nuns, grave, gave out.

There was weeping in every stall.

Though the stalls be empty of cattle, we trust.

Though our intellects rust, we grow tweedy-brown

and opportunistic, feeding off morsels.

A cosmos of relics in the crypt and a senior

sister led the laity around brilliantly by a

twisted adamantine-ringed nose, to see

broken finger bones, bloody cloths, brains.

Blood so blue and white we redden and hide

our film-star faces. Cagey.

Margaret crushed by a door. Martha martyred

by a window overlooking the park,

with swaggering ducks and blinding water.

Paddlers. What if you had held a grudge,

fondled it, and found that you had fallen in love?

He has turned up finally, his jaw like the suspension

bridge, magnetized with stubble, cheekbones like girders.

Oh no, I am not a cliché. See my inside.

Ten years inside but without the comforts of bantam mornings.

Bodies on beds shimmied into corners with shifty valances. September blues.

Fat satin. Sidling in from the green room. In the gut, a vagabond

ache like disgust. I walk cumbersome honesty sideways

through several doors, park her in the smoky alley.

Pull up compunction by his Jaeger collar, kiss his spandrel nose,

expel him into the snowy street.

I relish jealousy on the side with copious dressing.

Feed depression to a gull called Guillaume

on a bleak beach during lunch break.

Simplify the universe with a pie chart

and chomp down three-quarters of it with mustard and beer.