love poem for aritifical temperatures 

in june, i removed all the dust from the swamp cooler.
the wads smudged my handy inky grey as 
i pulled out more & more. 
the dust came out in the form of worms & grubs
then as pigeons who 
spattered around the room with all their choking-- 
their eyes full of tailisman & syringe.
they were the children of thick air.
i tried to breathe in & out to teach them
to settle & not pay attention to the pollution.
the cool seeped back into the living room
to remind us that somewhere 
seals were eating penguins & 
a snowflake was rising to eclipse the sun.
the temperature laugh its head off.
everyone else was gone from the apartment
& i pretended each day was a new apocalypse.
tomorrow we would wake up with the ocean
in the street & the next all the doors on fire.
i watched nature documentaries 
one after another. i watched them over
& over again until i lived the life
of a national geographic camera man.
i took videos of pigeons in the alley 
imagining them bursting into birds of paradise.
a wave rose as tall as our building 
& drenched me in night. 
i held conversations with the air conditioner
as it chattered with the outside would.
i asked it where it borrowed its face from 
& it spoke in a langauge only it would ever know.
i thought of days in march where the air 
was raw & bearable. i slept 
with my mattress on the floor. i could have been
a drift in any channel of water.
the swamp cooler told me story after story
& i asked for another & another & another
until its voice was my father's 
it he was perched in the window 
breathing cool air towards me.
we ask to often who wil keep you warm--
i want to know 
who will keep the winters alive in my apartment
when the summer is sharp & restless?
the pigeons return with dead grass in their beaks.
i feed them sugar cubes
to pacifiy them. put on in my own mouth.
the sugar cube is really a row house
just like ours. it is our house,
sweet & brief. my teeth turn to dust
the swamp cooler reads a poem.