You yes You - a poem

You are a forest of trees stripped of their leaves in the summer heat, a long stretch of beach without sand, a flock of birds with no telephone wires to rest on. You are an infinite list of odd numbers and all the letters of the alphabet inside out, backwards and upside down.

I think of the Dali image with the clocks melting and you are that landscape in black and white, composed of pixels too large and grainy. You are a wheat field resting next to a rusty tractor.

You are the flower who butterflies have abandoned, who hummingbirds will not sip from, who bees will not pause to drop their dung.

You are a temple built for a non-god and goddamn you to be a neighbor of Sisyphus, for the length of eternity plus a million years. You are a cacophony of pans in an abandoned luncheonette in an empty field next to a junkyard with no dog.

You evil spirit, curse you as many feathers as there are in a Bed Bath and Beyond pillow factory. May you nap at the bottom of the Mariana Trench and always be thirsty.

May you disappear like the witch in the end of a classic movie, like vapors in the road ahead of you that vanish when you come closer, like the ashes in a grill long after the embers have extinguished themselves. You are a furnace that fails to give off heat in the winter and the river turned to ice, with a stranded town down below.