Writing my Bike in Circles around this Poem to Prove that I Persist

by Sandra Simonds

I’m not settling like a formaldehyde drizzle on the morgue sea
of looping and looping figure eights
where junk DNA        births frozen snakes
and the Styrofoam moon pulls       pill-shaped lesions
out of a grey matter nightjar  from which the dolphins dart so
                        
be my Psychopomp, my amnesia egg where break’s
a feathered static the sound of a green balloon
going crazy losing air
to good-willed mouth-to-mouth  resuscitators.

My 4th mug shot grows claws, Psychopomp.
It grows a twelve inch tail of itch that looks
like a dependent clause twenty-three politicians long
swatting horseflies. I have hooves
of sugar and huff on fog and
they say I’m tough on crime but really
(as my 2nd  photo proves) I’m just
the mouthpiece  that keeps the poem agog.

Where the double-jointed hermaphrodite on the shoreline
turns its white ruffle dress into a ladle for the tide,
I’m the saltwater dispatch, a slab of sand
in the image of George Washington crossing the Delaware, a face
ferociously like yours.

Psychopomp, I’ve revised myself into being’s anon and anon
I’m riding my red bike ding dong
straight into the water, past the minotaur and the hermaphrodite
the EMTs and the green balloon
I’m pedaling with all my might
(corporate as jihad)
right through your snake bitten chest.

Other poems by Sandra Simonds in ActionYes #3:
I don't deserve your Riesling
LetMe Out