SHE LIKES A WITH A SHAVE

She likes a man with a shave
and a room temperature IQ
who can trips over his words
‘though he hasn’t spoken 
for weeks and months and more.

He is both Popeye and Bluto
brawling on avenues
and twisting streetlights
around the neck of the other
over a friendly
dispute over which one of them
is going to pay the bill.

He is also Leopold and Loeb,
Abbott and Costello,
matching pairs of
the same dark impulse
to play in traffic
and keep score besides.

He trips over words
he hasn’t spoken,
he is hit by buses
he didn’t see coming,
he is always flat on the asphalt
staring into what remains of heaven,
circles of planets, stars, and singing birds
and some notion that
he might have been someone named
Roland Barthes getting pulverized
by a laundry truck
in a city where words
are loud as car horns
screaming in configurations
that cannot be untied.

She likes cartoons
above all else,
cute animals
destroying
hungry wolves and
wretched vermin
endlessly in variations
that allow them to
eternally return to
the sparely drawn
desert-scape where
the only laundry truck
within 1,000 miles
in any direction
will find them
and collide with their heads
and flatten their bodies
like sheets of wax paper
just as they
are about to claim their feasts,
amid all their famine.

What goes around
turns out badly, she thinks,
I need a man
the way a man
needs a shave.