Schools of saints in cream robes dripping with incense flavored chant swim through the collective psyche. On the boat above the water, Jesus and Peter fishing. Below the seal of unsliceable surface, me singing to an ocean liner full of dead partiers. Hunting herds of razor sharp HR managers comb the water for verbal malfeasance. I want to tend nurseries of consonants. Instead, I bewitch a ghost in his last century’s best, who tells me I’m the best woman he’s never had.

Stale lightning works its way through my daily bread like fungal rhysomes. In the valley between my breasts, supine visions of cotton candy carnivals. Here in the molten core of ourselves, we can be absolved of our eccentricities in this solar system of sameness, revolving as it does around boiling coinage. Soon our daily water will grow up to be rain. It will fall into the sea, laughing.

Dancing sprites jitter alongside Death as he sweeps the purple plain with his discount scythe. From whom much is given, much will be extracted. The vineyards are choking on weeds taller than me. In the wine press, remnants of what were once promises, pulpy and thin. In my housework dress of cozy, comfy, suburban glamor, sleek thoughts of collecting glasses. The sprite looms over the landscape of life like a giant, pulsating windmill. Death is rational, is weighing his options, is looking at me.

The savage animals copulating in my piano make every melody glitch a little. Purple spurts of embodied sound bounce around the atrium. Furry fury rages by the gift shop. This is a lighting hospital. They do all kinds of procedures on light and light fixtures. In the gift shop there’s a card you can buy that says, “Congratulations! It’s a photon!” And there’s a picture of a little photon, absolutely beaming. My music is meant to mellow the plight of lights that were flickering coming in coming out as dark, burned out lightbulbs. There are a myriad of ways a light can die, splayed open on the operating table of life.

Follow the rubbery rainbows to the rambunctious roses. In the garden, my psyche sprints naked through the greenery. She’s too frightened to be embarrassed. In a cul de sac, a hunter of women with a skeleton in the trunk of his metallic black Dodge Dart. She is barely evading him, and he has more stamina. I turn to tending the roses, especially the pink ones. Then the neighborhood goes dark with a blackness so heavy it falls in flakes like snow, burning and refining my body.

Shackled sunbeams destined to die on the parched plains of our existence gasp a little just before they hit the ground. The sound is audible only to angels. I am an artificial light drooling over candles. My light is dusty, a little rose gold, disheveled. My God, God of pink peonies and purple pansies, strapped the ageless bulb to my heart. My heart beats because it is afraid not to. In the dark, Death holds a child’s hand.

Polychromatic blood leaks from the slits in my ankles. In another world I plant a garden of cosmos. In another universe I lay across my lover’s piano lasciviously. But in this world, my essence spurts out with the pressure of my body weight. Why did I carve windows to sinew and bone? In my ear, curled up and sleeping, my daughter dreams of some sort of purple peace I don’t understand. My love bandages me with magnolia petals, calling my windows “wounds.”