“Refine your appetite.”

The hand is mercurial, a pensile obedience

for a cute fox, the champion of open heart surgery,

and runs far beyond the prophetic tease, death is tepid

or so the child believes, the one that smiles in the stretch

of the sleeve, training the lock like a tarot. The earth walks

in the flesh of  the woman arrogantly, she is a folly of seasons;

a blush and then a pale, and so is no fairer to the changing tides

of our God, Curiosity, and slips, tipping apocalypse

like petals, marinating men maudlin.  Shaking the pantry, the prison

and the pill box, the best asphyxiation remains –

that heaven sent evil of Hope, lingering on a hinge.