Domiciliary of the State

The patchy woods breed acrobatic squirrels.
I reach only so far into the world

but, all the same, like Atlas, have to hold
it all entirely myself. I'm holed up

in a new cliché and take out a chair to sit
in my ashtray yard, accommodating it

with the bearings of a wave-bewildered man
expectorated up on foreign sand.

The lycanthrope, his first night as a beast,
is bored already. Languid from their feast

of thorny insects, camouflaged anoles
nod epileptic yesses from the holes

in my privacy fence. Like Plato's brother, they
agree at once with everything I say.

Copyright © 2006 Kevin Barents All rights reserved
from Meridian
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission