Eating Metal

Eating Metal

Nourishment is old-fashioned
like Veronica Lake
who was a beautiful black and white magpie
and never collected anything but sad
bits of the next nest

please give that girl a handful of staples and spoons
to pummel her into the modern swing.

Bread and booze, the old foods
are foolish, and change- bread becoming beastly
over the course of the body,
and I know I will too; as Veronica taught me.

It wears me down
like a garden of gray and flaking shale; let
it stay the same through, I will even be
glad when the pins hook my coiling hose
I'll let them prick and cling,
fierce magnetics grounding me to my same self-
or, if they unhitch, I am glad for their constant shining.

Burnt rosemary aches of bitter mustard,
Bay leaves leak alcohols. Foods bear
change. But wire barbs
are rust and real.
Their scratches are for my old itch
which began in my throat and shuffled down to my stomach.

Veronica makes me like copper best
because it is the choicest blood without breathing.