Your shadow follows me
like an oil smear on asphalt.

I carry your shrunken head in a paper bag.
No one mistakes it for wine.

The factory label reads:
“Do not cut threads between lips.”

You drooled forty-five books
before Daddy Death decked you.

Still, precautions must be taken
because you took democracy too far.

Now anyone with a spray can thinks he’s a poet –
just look at our streets.