he’s keeping his arms out, yardsticks to the sarcophagus
hazardly contains its lethal blast radius,
dripping astringent violet nucleotides
from a sting incommensurate with his ability to live.

his behavior is repulsive:
under the elephant’s foot on his floating ribs
he’s chained the little boy who foolishly needs his mother—
the boy imagines (or could it be)

mommy peers into his naked fourth reactor, hair already bleached and curling
a mortal dose of radiation jackknifing flags of white skin from her face.
she points at him as if to say: look at this intense little thing!
though seeming to forget, she doesn’t look very long after all.

incredibly, that clock breaks
now hopscotching in place over the stove
its round table of native birds quits discussing, and
his feeling deflates like a shitty air mattress: all night long

his body is a roadside memorial to the past self
glittered with artifacts, night’s perpetual vapors
tissue a self inventing-reinventing context to
the occupant of the inexact future self
following its separate continuity
with bones like delphic maxims, trying for permanent in the face of interpretation

memory is radioactive, the estuary of its half-life gapes virtually forever
so he can never leave himself in a past life, never
sink the particles into a lead-lined trapezoid
write on his red skin all over warnings in every known language
so long as memory is an active site, such disasters may occur