I.
Blood lurks in lingering, billowy gouts that haunt the yellow
darkness of their eyes with vermilion. Today their loved ones
arrive for the collective exorcism. Their pants and skirts wrap
sweet odors of urinal cakes, news folderol, and baseball games.
How long has their frightened gaze been frozen solid in place?
Car doors open. Young girls and boys’ eyes go fanatical with plans
to hustle orderlies out of peppermint candies with slow hosannas from
their palm frond eyelashes. Their parents follow & bop fingertips against
palm pre screens they bought recently between catching snatches of porn.
Prison doors open. Smells wind ghostlike, towards the bedlamites’ noses.
An inaudible grinding births snowflake shaped cracks in their teeth. When
gifts come up, inmates yell: I know! Misunderstanding, all guests sigh: Oh.

II.
Son faces father in a chair trying to decipher the reason behind the wiry
shape of Dad’s Top Ramen hair that flakes apart under the AC’s cool air.
Dad protects himself from the boy’s best red sweater by baking a dream
of himself as an immaculate sun that his boy sprints to full flail until the
boy’s soft body is reincarnated as a hiss of curling yarn enshrouding one
pile of steaming meat that can only lie there in a smolder of pulchritude.
Dad says nothing when the boy talks because the boy is Orange Sunshine.
Mom is just a white noise begging the boy to step from Dad's eyes, burning.

III.
A girl nestled behind Dad’s firm knees holds a séance to Mom’s ghost face.
Mom left long ago on an erotic dalliance with another woman. A woman
with limitless greens in her irises where Mom could finally let herself go.
The fantasy loops: She lies with the woman in a fallow cornfield. Their
tongues fight through white teeth to entangle each other like two beetles
grappling through eternal acres of mud slushes on an utterly filthy odyssey.
The girl would’ve broken the curse with her mother’s name on her lips. Before
she could’ve, mom’s chin wiggled into a flattering, white gown of spittle to worship
this time when she and her concupiscent hallucination came together on farmland.
Her daughter is lost among a row of corn; Her husband lost in a row of moaning.
They will not observe the tradition of looking into themselves and holding hands.

IV.
One lone schizophrenic surveys the paper bag on the table
in front of his hushed elder sister who brought him the bag
despite the ward’s strict orders to have lunch before coming.
The schizo spills his personality into each ridge, crenellation,
and fold on the bag. Eventually he realizes that he is the bag.
Every fold represents a new side of himself; his sister being
just another that he uses to comfort himself when he cannot
fabricate ways of making attentive friends by folding himself.

V.
A voice comes on the intercom. Blood rushes to the fore of the
whites in the inmates' eyes. Their dizzy hysteria embodies itself
in the fevered tempo of their hopping heartbeats. News comes:
For reasons we cannot disclose, tomorrow’s visiting hours must
be cancelled. White is the stark color that left their startled eyes
weak with the joy of knowing the outside world will stay there.