side effects may include:

buying a trampoline 
& singing to a pond of dead goldfish. 
calling your father & expecting him
to be a doctor.
calling your doctor & expecting him
to be a father.
a desire to see the world burn.
what they took from me was glass
& i do not have a name for that organ.
an apparatus to filter out the grief.
seeing the ugly truth. 
kissing the ugly truth 
& calling it a future.
let's not pretend we have not
been fantastical. let's not pretend 
we've never bought a lottery ticker
& held it like a dog leash. pull me
onto my hands & knees. i used 
to pray in the pews. i used to carve
a statue of my arms from dead trees.
dancing without a partner.
wasting a night on trying
to reason with the news.
driving a car through
the window of a deli. 
i make a shrine for every catastrophe
& filling an offering bowl with eyelashes 
& empty lightning bugs.
i understand why people have
for centuries thought that the body
is a vessel. the desire to pour out.
knowing how breath becomes
dragonflies.
listening to your father's music.
mistaking someone else's music
for your fathers.
trying to salvage a sunken ship
from the bottom of a lake of fire.
getting your hands burnt.
calling your lover.
your lover saying, "i am not 
your lover."
memory loss. fatal mimicry.
telling a story that didn't happen
just to have it come true. 
becoming a prophet to dogs.
knowing all that you know
& still getting up & taking the pairing knife
to the sun's grapefruit sting.
spitting the seeds out into the sea.