Peter Vries

Peter Vries behind the mirror
Narrow eyes submerged in focus
Above the isosceles knot of a purple tie
White shirt basking in blanketed sunlight
A smile to show for a breezy week to come

Peter Vries in front of the mirror
Red-rimmed bulges beneath wide eyes
Bright sunlight, broken window, brighter still
A sundog poised on each shaft
No tears to spare for a sultry Monday morning

Idiot at work, idiot at home, idiot everywhere
Yet still top of the class, delicious arm candy
With time a mishmash of leftovers, American chop suey
Reaching into the depths of the Atlantic
Right under the flap of his toilet seat

Drained and purified by rats in the sewers
Beneath Amazonian rivers and canopies of green
One boat to paddle and paddled to the ocean
Looking into the bulging head of an octopus
Meeting its lonely eyes sunk within watery life

Sometime flying, sometimes crawling, sometimes still
Like the fingers of Peter Vries standing on
Either sides of a Belgian mirror stolen from
Somewhere in the tomb of a local pharmacy
And thrust straight past the epiglottis, down, down

And back, defenestrated out of Atlantis, a hall of demons
Monsters one and all, covetous losers, give him
His antidote, his tears, the stuff of his snot so
He may sniff and weep and wipe and wipe
Something but the chips off mirrors and geriatric skin of iron

Peter Vries is beside a mirror, inside a mirror
Not trapped but the shadows of one journeyman
Like me, expelled argent minerals on my backside
Silvered and blown and erected and floored
Pregnant with the molten sand to make some more

Groping in hallucinated darkness for sugary bundle
Of wires in my brain, squirming like an injected baby
Away from the howling dogs in my five-fisted walls
Cataplexy in the knees of my beloved Vries before climax
And Monday's night comes on with the blowing of my switch