For Christine Schrader, No. 4: On Need


I was exactly of the eighth year when I needed you.

By nine, my fidgety feet jerked concentrically

Bettie Page, back-latched to a switchbaord.

Line one's propriety

Line two's reticence

Line three's tradition

And by the fourth patch-through, I'm new.


By '96, I was ten.

I had a terrible habit of running into things 

And seeing their awful dimensions,

A dodecahedron is just a census

Of

A dozen faceless congregations

Dealing caps, in worn undercurrents.


Need is ageless, it's everywhere at once.


It's 4:17pm in Los Angeles, and I'm twenty-two.

I've been hacking away at this new age

But

The belly of Buddha is the free-market-trade.

It's NAFTA

It's a coiling of underpassed fat roots

And distentions

Swollen, as the aged cocoon sacks,

That once latched to my branches back home.