Glowing comments of your eyes
across my thighs and why's of fate--
seem diamonds that don't belong to me.
A plastic leg, a set of dentures
chewing on the job ahead.
This struggle with its carat fire,
maximized by missingness,
is only a carrot poking up
from prairie grass.
A place where gardens
take their roots when seeds
of something find their wind.

I'm lifting weights,
slapping laps across the pool,
pacing treadmills in the gym
like fingernails across the board
in classrooms of mortality.
Nothing special, just some
plain brown-wrapper triumph
teething on decline and ebb.

A rumble strip in specious skies
for people with their limbs intact.
I am the udder of a dairy cow
milking motion's foamy worth.
Nothing special, stubborn maybe,
slightly transcendental heat.
Like flames of ethyl alcohol,
your burn is there, just colorless
until some challenge brushing death--
some lethal grade of suffering
arrests your body in an alley,
pins its arms against some wall
and picks thick pockets for its soul.