1. The heart, the linguam, the earth’s core, the tongue.
2. The eyes, the ears, the arms, the legs, the jaws, the twins.
3. The true eyes, the witches, the French knights-vigilante, the Trinity.
4. The dog’s legs, the inner planets, Death in Asia, the seasons and the winds.
5. The starfish’s arms, the fingers, the toes, the senses.
6. The monk’s dots, 111th the Beast’s mark, the true senses.
7. The Seas, the Deadly Sins, the Dwarves, the Virtues.

I’ve been mining the archives, sorting old papers, smudged, marked up copies of dead stories, ghost-poems, unsent thoughts on friends’ sleeping novels. Dust in the nose, a note I wrote to myself two years ago to watch for spiders.

I like lists and poems mortared up from lists. Lists ask us to link together any number of items, however strange, and to withhold our questions until the end. Lists beg us to logically concatenate a bunch of crazy bullshit, then to sum up that concatenation—to find the stolen topaz dropped in the outhouse muck.

1. The snake eats you.
2. The snake dies of indigestion.
3. The snake is a wheel of fire.

This last exemplary list is very important to the moral fate of humanity. I wrote it during the dark Bush years, before my lists were tamed by city-dwelling, rent-paying, and drink. Then, my lists grew like wild hawthorn, crêpe-white jonquils, the dry whirling fruits of a starving Prospect Park ailanthus, or the horns on gray, shag-coated goats. This last list grew backwards through logic, shedding its brains as it went like some Greek king off his rocker. It is named “The Order of Evils.”

1. Strangling Wholpins
2. The Pursuit of the Worthless
3. Squatting Over the Qur’ān
4. Literary Bugbears
5. “More is Less”
6. Cell Phone-Pas
7. Dixie Cups of Tequila
8. Onion Dip Gone Bad
9. Movie-Dinosaur Sound “FX”
10. School of Writhing Autistic Sharks
11. The Cantaloupe
12. Karl Rove
13. Saying Anything Barbarous