The cityscape is a hodgepodge of skyscrapers designed
to look like wine bottles and martini glasses
and nosebleed stilettos, all constructed from the recycled
dreams of dead rock stars. Banana airplanes
glide through the heavens on glittery feathered wings,
and every Christmas Eve the pink cotton candy clouds
rain psychedelic gumdrops.

Freshly gutted cherubs are displayed on meat hooks
in the storefront windows along the sidewalk leading
to my high-rise coffin at the intersection of Lincoln
and Olympic Boulevards, otherwise known as the end
of Route 66. I reside in a replica of the Statue of
Liberty, way up at the top, in the torch. The building’s
doorman is a life-size bronze statue of the prior
doorman, who worked here for fifty years before he
was killed in a doorman-related incident.

The penthouse suite (where I kick up my feet) is ultraintrauterine,
with sky blue carpet and fluffy white
pillow-clouds shaped like couches and recliners,
wallpapered in dove feathers. Two wide-eyed windows
afford a panoramic view of the Ferris wheel at
the Santa Monica Pier, which is currently on fire.
Don’t ask me why. All of our answers are mansions
aflame. The whole world is burning in slow motion.

My refrigerator is stuffed with roadkill marinated in
Dom Pérignon. My toilet is made of cholla cactus...
my bathroom mirror is made of yellow misaligned
teeth, closetful of fizzled neon Narnia. If you lift up
the carpet in the far left corner of my bedroom, you’ll
find a knothole in the fleshwood floorboard where
you can peek at the kaleidoscopic clockwork universe
within me.