ending with lines from "The Snow Man" by Wallace Stevens

She sees the spinning motion of
the crucifix above her head,
but she does not see the crucifix itself:
this is belief– a whipping pinwheel
hypnotizing all that is real out of her.

Spirit spirit spirit, you are not there,
I have learned in my eighty-five years
of five births and one asbestos house
that held in ziplocked love.
Sleep comes in small tastes

and blood pressure checks in booms
that shatter precious pauses.
Burial dirt creeps outside her window, 
designed and paid for, sky
a dumb shell leading to ignorant dark

where ages of promises rot and flake.
The unseen spiraling crucifix descends
and fans her medicinal fever:
this is the breeze of belief
to which her logic surrenders,

and she claws out to
nothing that is not there
and the nothing that is.
                        

Oh lions dandy be,
lords of undesirables,
hideous beauty--
severed and you multiply
your toxin tenfold,
disrupting uniformity.

Your leaves taper
to fangs that chew
July morning mist
like a fawn’s molars.

Oh throned totalitarians,
star map to Hades,
I bear witness
to your vile propagation,
your urge to conquer the Green
enslaved by your infections.

Control your egg yolk erections,
and when your afros peel away
to conspire in sidewalk cracks,
give your stolen yellows back.