Complaining Implement Assigned to the Repair of Breaches, Leaks, and Escaped Convictions
Rich Ives

With a telephone and a sparrow I’m presently entertained,
having held the tongue one used for dancing, but
the baby walls are too short to make a house,

so the residents outlaw appendages, but then
no one can leave, and the houses fill with too much
existence, and the baby roof keeps jumping on the baby floor.

The residents in between have to bite and bite and bite.
Why can’t maturity be taken for granted? scream the baby renters.
That’s when the roof turns off, and the sky seems to be falling.

The vampire’s entirely unnecessary, which makes
him happy, and the moon indispensible.
The copper in your extra mouth is softening.

The corruption spreads, so that the moon is only a girl crying
across the long hall that doesn’t end in a way out.
The renters try to turn the roof off again, but it’s nighttime.

What remains unspoken: the sunlight that swallows the damp need,
or this, the thingness of it, and rent with its own weapon. She stands
aimed at the stairs undescended, plunged into her clothing and questioning,

as if to say What doest thou think of me, Housedress? This time
the bag of medical waste included discarded treatments to fix treatments
to allow the cures, magnificent and cheap, cylinders of perfection

hidden inside the local bird, this incident a cool report, a withheld
bottle of exhaustion breaking, softened by the bloody sleeve of sunset,
the one brushing me open with her knowing (circular),

a wave of collusion still suspended between a cloud and a cloud,
a shiver (linear) inside, reveling in accomplished missteps
so wide the bag of rain (cylindrical) can’t contain it.