i. Hydromancy

Holy water stains evaporate
into strange shapes on the remains of
another decade’s disintegrating drapes,

aspersions of angel sweat swim in
the sink, deep dives of someone’s concept
of heaven’s fallen rain transmuting cigarette

ash to infertile ink, implanting
in the mind sordid impressions no
rational soil can take, reversing fortunes

only to put to shame every
stone monument to Thutmose the Third
erosions of winds whistling sinister words

pulverizes for osmosis to
reclaim, wiping away his face, as
if knowing better than the world’s powerful

                    ii. Hydropathy

ever will, all water returns to
its origin one way, one day, or
another, that what bathed pharaohs, what kings drank,

what peasants pissed in, what we spend too
many dollars on, ever since pangs
of insufferable cholera did in

so devastatingly well the less-
fortunate, less-than-cosmopolitan
portions of our Victorian urban

populations, to put in bottles
of ersatz plasticized irony
which tepid purity always wears, crystal

distillations of sins from their storms’
original forms to perform still-
disposable comforts for our awful fears

                    iii. Dissolute Aquarelle

of contamination, healing with
an intangible œconomy’s
evaporating consolation of its

invisible affluence, what mists
into tears which inevitably
disappear whenever history blinks, ‘Drink,

drink,’ the scene says, ‘Drink thin this drip of
thought someone else left for you to think.’
And, ever since he did, the guest before me

who slipped in the tub and hit his head
left everyone amnesiac
as I am, still, wondering how I swallowed

this pill thundering against the walls
of my thoughts as much as my stomach,
parched as hell in this desert squalor ink fills.