(Why) You are Here

He wonders what the cardinal really thinks of him.
He wonders if pine siskins have nightmares about rats' teeth.
He wonders if rats put their front teeth
under tiny pillows when they lose them.
The Rat Tooth Fairy would make a lovely gay ballet.
He knows all about the acknowledgment that hates itself.
He thinks the bluejay's hair plugs are funny.
Did you guess yet this is a children's book?
He is sometimes the beloved of medical strangers.
He hopes one day to have one write him a sonata
in the context of an emergency room.
He has insidious camouflage.
"Oh might you help?" he asks a dead sunflower
impersonating Charles Baudelaire one roadside, one winter.
What poem?
He watches five questions.
He questions five watches.
Just to make conversation he invents an ancient throat.
Sometimes he grows attached to dying animals
and addresses them in poems
which he sails at them in the form of paper airplanes
in a passive-aggressive manner.
This is is how most Kings in ancient times
met their Queens, actually.
They would crumple up balls of animal skin
from the leftovers on their plates and throw them
at their beloved's finely-coiffed head.
Or sometimes bits of antlers or teeth from a roast beast
would be cast across the room,
and bean the Intended, who would often smile.
Some of her teeth would of course be green
from cholera or moss or a bit of witchcraft.
Or she would vex him with a curse, a heart-brake,
and have one of her liege-men place a ladder under his bedchamber
and have the liege climb it under cloak of moon's-dark
and place a rabid hedgehog in the Royal Bedchamber.
This was an unequivocal rejection of the suit.
We actually owe our thanks for today's mood-altering drugs
to the rituals of medieval courtship.
Sometimes a poison wasn't strong enough,
and instead of getting a discreet murder
we ended up with a pleasant good time,
and possibly even a dynasty. Most of us are here
because some poison failed to do its work
and there was a liverish breakfast and morning after,
and then a swelling like a dead groundhog in summer
at the side of the road. Romance and manners
are things which balloon like this, and everything
on earth is full of alien life.
There is no love without parasitology.

Some creepier ones will explain this as human psychology.