I could ask what it means to be clean, to scrub and scrub
and scrub and scrub and scrub and fall asleep scrubbing.

I smell of machines, of wet droning plastic: staid
reproductions of humiliation I fling into the washing.

From pores, for amours, with snores, I know disgust
is a defense mechanism, automatic, anachronistic.

I want nothing of this. I imagine walking into a river.
I chomp on the bistre cavern of a rotting apple.

I wake up wanting wood betany and pass the day
borrowing from frost, heightening my inaccessibility.

Needing to relinquish my contempt but not knowing how,
I douse it with eruptions of indiscriminate kindness.

Later, I lie awake and listen to whispered maledictions,
swatches of shadow preserved into spring.