Red Eye Boucherie

Rounding the line between insomnia and a pig in a hamster wheel

The monetary crimp of mortgage crystals form on eyelids like watchmen

Stationed to poke irises from indulging in the oblivion of slumber

Rotate, re-rotate; desire continuance like a blanket of uneasiness

Four a.m. sleeping somewhere that does not feel home again

The belly-ulcers of the West bank expressway are gargling for morning

To cross the highway into swampland or to find saints in a city full of sinners

Asleep like turtles in their mobile homes, webbed feet and elastic necks for the noose

Of wanting more at the grocers than what one can imbibe

The ham hocks are choice for Monday sweats with turkey necks

Cooking with a New Orleans’ atheist trinity, using the red onions again

Slice the celery thin like a razor blade to the face wanting something to grow

Pruning the bell peppers crisp into the darkness of the beans, creamed over

While the Earth sinks and the storms haunch out there in the Gulf eyeing over the buffet

In the pot for next week’s seafood gumbo trading partners for the clock strikes

Knowing that midnight is wandering to be relevant to a man that does not sleep

The days cake together into a residue of rather not think about it weekends

Actions, opportunities, prefer the routine of preoccupation as salve for the red-eyes

Crisping like tasso in the pan, salty and torn between bodies

The veins in the tissue cross-cut perpendicular to the sinew brake easier

For the others to digest mechanically as the taxis roll into the airport departure line

Tips go both ways like students hitting sophomore year trying cocaine

Timid to admit to thinking about suicide as if every kid in the class wasn’t

At least once or twice during the semesters stacked as if life out the crucible of hormones

Would be easier when lawyers get involved, automobiles, and stainless steel cooking pots

Registered for and received for the kiddies who still get married in the church

With the white and the priest and the line to drink from the cup

Swallow and smile and see the glare from the choir loft sleep in the photographer’s studio

Pay him for the memories on canvas in the colors like a tattoo on a skin sail-cloth

Spread like a flag for an Antebellum porch for Cajun two-steppers dancing like a nail

Got stuck in each of their feet, smelling the aroma of Monday’s waft from the stove

The Jazz Festival posters hung in symmetry as years never-attended stack like bragging rights

Oh, Oh, Thunder Road take him home like the night is forgiving asking for saviors

And all that can be heard are the engines out there on the highway

Passing to nowhere under open eyelids seeing it all as the street lights glare their yellow x’s

As hoods tilt low and jump up open to keep vision sanitary to the asphalt

Speak quickly the hours are passing into time to head back to the work room

Find the hammer and the keyboard typing away numbers for Americans with bank account

Deposits and faces that make distributions for deductions as if worrying about managing

What one can do to appear like the dance was planned with the holler of the fiddler

To take a turn with a man’s wife chewing on a reed twirling to Louisiana Tuesday night

Accordion style Fais Do Do twirling partners in shrimp boots and heading to the boucherie

To set the hog to slaughter with the town lined up to use every organ and drop of blood

Before the porcine-legged belly knows what hits him; won’t even have time to fall asleep first