Roaring Bellies.

The times are like lines of trumpets bursting in through church windows and I am seeing shapes that compose poetry.

Pews filling with crabtrees and tabby cats, sitting properlike, raising limbs and paws between appropriate pauses. You see your sister, she is covered in glitter. She licks an ice cube and the world is round. Preachers reading minds & kaleidoscope eyes glazed over, roaming with shopping carts overflowing with cartwheel catalogues. Everybody is famous.

Congregations outgrowing prophecies with every electric refrigerator repairmen appearing at their doors. Ostriches in the streets are seen pulling carts full of children in snowmen suits and with bear bellies. Roaring bellies. Meanwhile, the saints are scribbling formulas into blank pages of public bibles, ripping corners of hymnals, slipping principles into pockets. Your lap contains traces of star dust, you use your hands to push it to the floor, but it sticks to your fingers and you see particles in glimmers of sunlight.

Madness is in the airwaves. Flappers find themselves in trails to the Milky Way. Business men lost in the labyrinths of rag time and bedrooms on wheels. The organist hits the same keys for the banana dance.

We were once berries buried by fingers next to Babe Ruth’s baseball cards, patted beneath soil by baby toes in ballet shoes atop a constellation of mirrors reflecting two cities. We have grown from flying schools for humans who want to be pigeons. Products of grandmothers covering their eyes and going down slides. And ooooh, the bathing suits. We are products of bathing suits. We are abstract art graffitied over sepia family photos. You and I, we are a stream of panoramic films capturing bright lipstick and quantum physics. We are horror watching horror watching horror, reading the Sunday funnies and doing the foxtrot.

Every day we are more than our ancestors. I am too big for the spaces that hold me.