The neighbor’s coiffed wife cools coffee and splits her lips
Grinning with a monkey’s frightened hiss;

Her tongue clicks out telegraphs, and my body is blind.
“Dah-ling. Didn’t you expect him to be so unkind?

Writers don’t know no allegiance, they clean their teeth with flagpoles.
They lick for their supper the dry bones that build their home.”

So I thought I heard when I saw her laugh, spinning what’s left
Of my body into the valley of her gullet, through her chest,

Bouncing around her rib cage, spent out on the limp balloons of her lungs.
Well of course I expected, the secretaries forget the fun, the

Literary appeal of being brutalized. Like Jane Eyre on a razor-line. Yes,
I pricked my ears to hear the nothings of Unkindness.

And I let Neglect tongue his sloppy way through my sleeves.
How I wept went Cruelty didn’t call. Or grieve.

But Carol’s patio goodness has half the presence in this mind
Of kissing vertebrae for a man who only looked at leather spines.