wages for vivisection

Dedicated to Haley Heynderickx, Max García Conover,
and Woody Guthrie

It depends on the cold if you will sleep or not
and even at that point you think about those
too cold, too exposed to sleep, because you
were raised in the glory to think about the fish
for the sea, God for those like me to hear all day,
and the patronage for those left out of a sorts,
in the traffic in our minds’s cut, trailing scarce;
like the shaping stars on an elbow’s sepulchral map,
where blood did bellow from the concrete-gated heart
stowed shorn in communal speech and medical theatre