Gliding Toward the Lamps

1.
The way a woman keeps her house
makes me want to sleep over
to see how she comforts herself alone.

I see from the street this woman likes to snuggle:
her alcove is smothered in comforters.
I imagine being curled up in there against the wall,
watching her tonguing a cruller.

2.
As I glide home I think of the Robotroid Girlfriend,
and I am gliding toward the little lamps in her eyes.

I have turned her every-which-way and never
found the fuse box. I don't know how she works.
I think of the way she lies rumpled
in the rumpled bed, everything inside her switched on and purring.

I would love her bare arms to scissor my neck again.

from The Robotroid Girlfriend

I tightened her screws.
We hadn't seen each other for weeks — maybe longer for her,
who didn't sleep.

Five

I awoke to find the building empty,
peacocks hooting outside
on the grass courts, and to my left, in bed
with me, her forehead dappled with sweat
of napping, the daughter of a man I knew.
I poked at her but she would not wake up.
I slipped into a white robe which dwarfed me
and went downstairs. The jacuzzi burbled.
Late sunlight blanched the far end of the courts.
Erotic pamphlets lay scattered around
but I was too tired to engage with them
in any way; I flipped through the pages
then fixed a brisk drink, and one for the girl.
We were alone as stone outcroppings.
She rolled over in bed, pulsing. I stripped
off the bedclothes and she squirmed but still slept.
Nobody would ever know what I did.
When I emptied both drinks on her, she slept
through it, and when I sipped them from her
declivities, and rolled her to get at
the rest, she mumbled in her sleep and frowned
like a schoolgirl mentally rotating
a three-dimensional object in her head.
And when the poison in the drinks pressed me
on top of her and my tongue fell out
quivering against her clavicles, and
my entire body went tumescent,
her face became calm. The face of a doll.
Then I realized she really was a doll,
a very warm, battery-powered doll.