morning writing: poem in which an office is flooded

water pools

the trip-switch has engaged –

who forfeits their power to kill

then but the frayed yellow serpents

to the cavernous three phase

outlets gashed into the wall

between photographs of her children

at too embryonic an age to have formed

any likeness at all to her –

century old clumps of plaster

career in white plumes down from the ceiling

to the carpet, wreck upon ruin, as she

covers her head and pictures a giant drum sieve

full of icing sugar – pictures cocaine divided

in dead places like this –

pictures icebergs falling from the sky

onto tracts of pasture covered cap-à-pie

in master-forged Japanese knives
pointed blades-up to the pale onslaught –

the portrait of her youngest has gone crooked –

not knowing what possesses her

she sits atop the sopping banker’s desk

which belonged to her father in law once

uses her feet to grapple the frame into order

while tearing reams of paperwork into pulp.