What if?

What if I opened my mouth
and spilled some shapeless rigmarole
like tongues, but suddenly it changed to Mandarin
and woke up dogs that slept by monoliths
inside their perfect circles?

Grapes would drop like punch marks into clover,
write manifestos with their stems
and burn the vines, exalt the trees, posit flames
that cannot soften Billy's ice-cream
tipping its sugar cone, his hair

tousled by flatbeds on a rural highway. Houses put on
their gaudy plumage: gray stoles, orange feathers.
Flat tones stink, ash bleats its siren.
Abstracted to a giant room
the monkeys hammer into oblivion.

The mad king makes his quietus, words wrested
from his throat, betrayed at last by you
that suppose a world without objects,
relations without boundaries. The bishop's
lips curl, the smug dimple

a few mere inches below the eye winking
its satisfaction. A suicide slouches
close to white cliffs, a demon fudges
with a handkerchief. He will say nothing
in the end and in the end he says nothing.

Nonetheless tall camels
sidle through the eyes of needles
at every imaginary prick
brandished as a bodkin.
Pigs circle or form a wedge,

platonists lick their pencils. Clock-hands
spin berserk, dogs revolve,
sink to the shoulders in tenuous loam.
The towers melt
but Billy lives.

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