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heaven fits in my suitcase
 
they're bored today in heaven
so they send down a few of the slower angels
with faces almost featureless
like henry moore sculptures
and their mouths are streaks in marble
and their eyes are like cockroaches painted into a canvas
and they fill the hotel office dressed as clerks
whenever my love goes to return our bloody key
with it's number rubbed out
and it's ghosts with their jaws wired shut with coat hangers
paralyzed chattering in the wind
dropping toward a slow day in hell
punching the clocks and descending the elevators
to do the devil's dullest work
they go without mining helmets
they go without icepicks
into a mine that they pick at with their hands
and the tunnels gasp around them 
and their eyes become noses
protruding from eyesockets 
filled with interplanetary minerals and wet palpitating cash registers
 
they're bored in heaven today
so they send an overweight angel 
into the belly of my girlfriend's guitar
and it slows her hands until the strings stretch and 
creak with the sound of iron girders being bent
in the skyscrapers that cast their grudging smiles over the river
pollution becoming a rainbow cluttered with bent statues
with their features rounded and marble
more featureless angels filling my eyes with chalk
 
they're bored in heaven every day 
so they ask me to come up and entertain
and i'm struck dead by the unbearable cruel beauty of god
so they send me back on an airplane that doesn't know my name
and every day i'm resurrected
next to the river by the city
eating raw fish with concrete dust in their bellies
the buildings spilling out of them like dust from the moon
and every day i punch the comedian's clock in heaven
and am struck dead again one minute into my first joke
being mortal and not ready 
for the buried swords in the floor of eternity
but they bring me up again with earthly lice leaping away from my hair 
knowing that i'll be killed before i can entertain the angels
and sending me down on a plane imploding with dull conversations
that crashes embarrassingly like a water balloon
on the street where my house threw out it's own closets
and swallowed the woman who lived there who's now filing her nails in heaven
with a sound like a broken violin
held together only by it's strings

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