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Or Why the Assembly Disbanded as Before

Hosanna in the borderline cinderblock warehouse, as much applause

as possible to collapse inside an ambulance now that conveys

 

The intravenous bags and bottle holder, twenty-seven stones

from here to the Idyllwild     to the gun fields

 

It’s a place you find automaton nurses who labor

in green-grey subterfuge, in all-over stripes

 

A round of punches to the lower jaw for my part in the main

so I get it now I’m the chosen one for reassignment

 

Face so altered as to beguile. This is enemy-convenient

a purview suitable to very new cosmetic methods.

 

Question is the admin diazepam and other hypodermics

were they counteractive or now consistent

 

With enough cases as to compel canvassers to anticipate

first signs of panic, sleepwalker antecedents

 

Tray tables in upright position, crushed ice out of open

mouth, air-conditioned ward redolent of superstores

 

And tattoo shops, or was it morphine sulfate in protocols

applied to disable the congenital twins?

 

Here’s the world news: to junk-science prizes wax-candy

lips intone a flawless if always accented sentence

 

The kind of talking from another world where my mother

was Marlo Thomas and there were rival techniques

 

Contributed to the celebrity of my seven-sided disappearance

or was that all my enuresis when I doubled in size

 

As from her pocketbook, adorable but already diminishing?