MY MYTHOLOGY                                                                                              

It's more than a glossary, a colloquium

of pinpricks in a black sheet of paper                                                                                          

held to light. Like other worlds, it is first word

and exhausted star. Each time I return

I open it again, pry back the installed

grate, and go inside.

It is dark inside.

It smells of old fur inside. The walls are all

computer basketball graffiti, jokes about bits,

tits, the sort of shit you'd expect.

It appears to lead on forever.

The walls, the room, the passageway goes on

until it vanishes in perspective. Imagine if

this was the Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti

writing in De pictura, 1435

codifying geometric perspective

transforming the pictured world into a better

replica of itself.

Inside that world, that hole, that ball

is everything

or I want it to be everything, as limitless

as language, my Michigan, mother,

my frozen hole of weather,

the cat's eye that recurs,

the balls, the blood, my blood, this book,

my bursts, my armless brother,

all the availability of blizzards, Dairy Queen

and other, my form, the heart,

that Icarus, the light and the like,

the loss, my mine, my motion, my emotion,

my patterns, salt, my sermons, demons, stars,

my sums, weather, whether taken together

this constitutes my or anyone's semblance of a world.