Magritte’s Mask

                The problem of shoes demonstrates how the most barbaric things
                pass as acceptable through the force of habit.

                                —Magritte

Where did you think you were going with that gun?
Indebted and intended to wake you up, les amantes, I’ll
pull your trigger first when you least expect
it, against the missing days, wearing my hat

and black umbrella, my somnambulism the furniture now
shares with me in the house, if they can claim kinship
to me as you have done, smoking
yourself down to size.

I’d lick your boots, your breastplate clean, shine your clocks
to come candid: my door is slightly ajar: come inside my
outside, seen by common sense like a collection
of missing buttons and body parts

where I roll up my pant legs, walk right into the pleasure
principle, the blood-water, up the ladder of fire, past
my prior assumptions. Be & be what it may
& be that brute assertion

I always thought you were. But, for God’s sake of habit,
take off your work boots first, set them out on
the dining table and fill them to
the ankle with the very best red wine you have.