I remember laughing real hard

as my brother died in front of my eyes

swept under a big black dragon of a tractor

trailer screeching WHITE FUEL painted

on its sides and just just not braking in time

gobbling him up who’d been chased by

the angry grocer with a broom for stealing

some ice cream into the middle of the wide 

wide street shouting and the wagon and the driver

and the screeching and the faces swarming in

the ambulance whooping it up and the white sheet

and the morgue and my mother shrieking

the burial and hysterical madness

my god my god I laughed and laughed

after all these years I laugh so funny

so exquisitely funny the way pain is

as it tickles your insides to death

A doctor once asked me why

stones should not be thrown

in houses made of glass.

They should, I replied

I said, they should

How else would one get out?

(Or think of Alice

at the core of mirrored shingles—

mind-menagerie, jungle of fragmented self—

ogling or smeared leers and everywhere eyes

with nothing to wipe away

distortions, but bags

and bags of broken stones.)

But he was not amused

and scribbled and smiled and conjectured

with his eyebrows. I glared

through raging eyes glazed with fear

and darkness all the way through

the Rorschach blots

building beaming rainbows to castles

and castles of refracted logic.

(Tears are constructed of such rainbows

and rainbows of such glass.)

Fingers pressed to the window pane

with the world whirring past

I wept cold as any stone trembling

all the way to the facility.