This is my endless summer day:

frayed currents of thatch, matted down
like hair on a dead labrador. The mud-
clogged ditch a soaking eye
inseminated by Sun.

That’s

where I

crawl out from, reborn

not as a ship’s ornament,

no, something closer

to a cannon. I fire darkness

down a well and fill its absence

with aching light.       I kill

by encircling.

After all,

what’s the point of power

if not to prove itself?

A familiar voice crackles out
of an abandoned radio: Mayday!
It’s my better half, calling me back.

Not now, dear. I cast around

for something else to obliterate.

You know,

the sleeping are so hard to distinguish
from the dead, so I mark them

in red. Punctuate their sentences.

The radio hisses again, this time
in the guise of a dispatcher.
Break, break! Return to the station.

Nice try. He can’t hitch me to that keel

any more

than you can leash a lioness.

One last attempt at coercion
with a weather report: Lower temps
are on the way, indicating an end
to our seasonal drought.

I refuse

to believe in a half-cocked prophecy.

How strange:             the horizon is a wild scarlet

verging on orange.

There’s a sea of it at my ankles.

I might

as well drink.