on going out to get the mail

  the droll noon
  where squadrons of worms creep up like
  stripteasers
  to be raped by blackbirds

  I go outside
  and all up and down the street
  the green armies shoot color
  like an everlasting 4th. of July,
  and I too seem to swell inside,
  a kind of unknown bursting, a
  feeling, perhaps, that there isn't any
  enemy
  anywhere

  and I reach down into the box
  and there is
  nothing not even a
  letter from the gas co. saying they will
  shut it off
  again.

  not even a short note from my x-wife
  bragging upon her present
  happiness.

  my hand searches the mailbox in a kind of
  disbelief long after the mind has
  given up.

  there's not even a dead fly
  down in there.

  I am a fool, I think, I should have known it
  works like this.

  I go inside as all the flowers leap to
  please me.

  anything? the woman
  asks.

  nothing, I answer, what's for
  breakfast?

Appears in At Terror Street and Agony Way, 1968, Burning in Water Drowning in Flame, 1974 and Run With the Hunted, 1993

©Linda Lee Bukowski - used with permission