Girl, Your Body Has So Many Holes for Straws

At night black-and-white keyboards mix wildly

Twilight hour like when the blind stare at the sun

I + bird (tied up with a piano string) + music escape from time

and go up the chimney of white beard’s piano repair shop

Girl, how wonderful that there’s music playing nonstop in the universe!

says white beard

Things that crossed I + bird + music’s minds while flying!

People down there work so hard making stuff their whole life, then they pass away

What are they making anyway?

They can’t even launch a single star into space

All they do is cook

wash vegetables

make wheels and

write fan letters to pop singers

I + bird + music

create a universe the size of a bathtub

Splash!

Then

I + bird + music float up

like bird’s transparent death note

Who keeps erasing our bird house up in the air?

A country where nothing gets wet even if it rains

A country without daddies even if daddies arrive

Pianos tightly strung with nerves

have bad toothaches

But I + bird + music say,

This letter is written by our achy hands

we open the endless letter in the distant future

In the desert

rain falls for the first time in 300 years

The seed that had been waiting for it

shoots up to the very tip of the sky

This infinitely sad, distant scenery

a rain-soaked desert, viewed from a telescope

a lone piano

but it’s time, for the thunderous applause to fade

for the cymbals of silence to crash, to announce time’s funeral

for Gliese 581c to open its clenched fists and spread gravity’s fingers

200 trillion kilometers away

I + bird + music lie prostrate like a corpse, hiding at the bottom of a lake, then stand up to shake off water, then lie on a bed of shredded radish and fried glass noodles like a sliced raw fish, panting for air, wearing apricot blossoms behind our ears, then like strewn laundry fall onto the couch barely breathing, then do stuff like cooking, washing vegetables, dragging our chained feet, bleeding.

I + bird + music vomit what we’ve chomped down, the hour of departure is bound to

return, the hour of long-haired tadpoles leaping into frog’s dream is bound to return.

White beard is bound to jabber away

Girl, your body has so many holes for straws

But it’s time to bang on the black-and-white keyboards then a

cool splash! It’s time to untie the birds strung to the piano