Thylias Moss

And then I stood there

                           anywhere at all


wishing myself at Mac and Ernie's Roadside Eatery
for one of Nayleen's cabrito burgers


                           I want to be full of her goat 
                           jalapeno topped

before I get back to God


     -------on with the detour-------------

                           —as if one could detour from God
                           —isn't that the major point—
    
                                               for the master skill
                                               in some of this


I've seen them (would like to) crawl
to Nayleen for a caprito bite


Understand:  this has something to do with her membership
in a tin-roof league, a shack that couldn't keep out the gourmet*
(*this word's on the same line — this is all

ONE LINE  — so the continuity winds a bit, but one line


to the diner, the dive in Tarpley: population fifty, 
between Bandera and Utopia   (I've had to tell everybody this
(same line again)    (crooked, lightning line),

said it to Josh busy with his sutras

that could have incorporated the caprito also



because it changes you; bite into something, and you, and the

something are marked, are launched further

     into a becoming

than can happen anywhere, in the smallest cell of me,

the nucleus of which is a sutra too, dead cells of me that seem 

frozen, crystal death —now isn't that grand (somewhere in me

that doesn't care about hurt     —anywhere in me that hooks up

                          with the GRAND caprito


That's it, it's becoming amplified, the changing, the transforming,
the eating to fuel metamorphosis, my caterpillar of a voice goes
in the microphone and comes out  in streams like the
amplification of luminescent blue-bulbed glowworms in a cave
and nowhere else, the spectable of these blue-bright living
curtains of bait and snare nowhere else, by God,

all by God, under Him, over Him, right through His middle
where I breathe the best air without either one of us seei

Editor's note: We don't know quite how she did it, but Thylias tricked the system into giving her an additional 15 minutes. She stands with Charles Bernstein as the only poets to go meta-muse on us. Anyway, you may read part 2 of her agon here.