Here's Something

Voodoo

Expect this:
You will forget the sanctity of sleep
and if you ever find it,
mice will chew the soles of your feet.
Your meals will turn to sand.
Every light and fan in your home
will instead be hung with pointing fingers.
Friends will leave like rains.
Your nostrils will be stuffed with the scent of your own slow rot.
Also, you will be told the minute of your death.
A magpie will caw it to you every morning
and each day a new bird will join
the first until your yard is heavy
with your future.

Because of you,
We have to listen beneath the wind,
wonder when the dogs gulp,
interpret wood bending as limb or porch.
Our dreams stutter,
even our dreams
you harry, you pince, you slur
and vault into our secret spaces.

So when you want to end this,
remove a thumb and see I have replaced the marrow with rice paper. Follow the map to an opera where the love song of the diva will give you a question. These answers I have written on the belly of the moon. Find and tie all six sacrifices to the tether of a kite and wait for a wind that sounds like a long “Yes”. Now pull the one hair in your eyebrow that is actually fifteen feet long and tie yourself to a tree before letting that kite buck into that breeze. Hold even if it seems your palms will sever. When that kite is empty, burn it down and drive the char to the lake whose name is spelled out in the wounds of your hands. And when you’re sprinkling the ash on the slick wax surface of the water far, far from us, stay there, you son-of-a-bitch.