Moral Improvement
Adam Clay

Note: the heresy of the didactic is only interpreted
correctly by a woman, say twenty or so, with hair of differing colors,
with curls of smoke drinking air through her eyes.
Even if she doesn't bother to cross her right knee over the left,
the fire that is God still fills up each of her teeth.

           It's been discovered that this ancient art of territory marking
isn't anything that can be held; it's an ice cube
which when placed on a stovetop
stays mostly solid. The few drops of water
that do melt, though, are the blood running through the woman,
and then, much later, through the person she decides
to touch, the person who doesn't show up in photographs,
the one who only pretends to dance.
                                                 This current of power
is much like a set of headphones,
which look just like ears, but aren't. They're tuned
into a channel
                   that would spill everything
into place if we could all hear it. But the one she's touched,
is the only one allowed to listen.
                                           When Edgar Allan Poe was found
unconscious and dying in a ditch, he was clean shaven,
wearing two different socks, and had a rough outline
of The Waste Land in his coat pocket. The cloud
raining above him was named Ambition.