The Gilded Zero

Only open homes & woods & pansies’ blue ledges can lead the zero with his only arms to embrace himself in open fields for all to gape upon. He unbuttons steel-gray sheets, a knotted top coat, bares himself, his hole, a vision as framed by the marker that is where his body blew and left enclosure intact, skeletal innards enough to make moviegoers ask, “Has anyone finished themselves yet?” I haven’t. I swim the lagoon, take note: the babies are barely dirty, their armpits smooth with silky soot weighted in apartment cycles like we keep movement in boxes for thunderstorms, and the railroad leaves a dancing behavior absorbed by every second thought, escaping the socket that was his mission, his body incomplete, to help us to the maidenhead of Niagara, a target awakening the chlorophyll of trees, their tongues the densest forest canopy and floor thigh deep with root rot we sleep on and fold into growing-whole sheep what becomes of the lot: night’s zero hour of what is & what isn’t, till death, not us part.