Tori Amos
she is stealing Sunday’s sacred octaves
and subverting their pious trajectories
with elliptical detours
and she sets a ménage between The Salton Sea
and a Stiletto Co-op
and cultivating hybrid fruit in the soil
of impossible topographies
she’s Robespierre in the guise of a doge
commissioning millefiori for an auto-da-fé
she knows that ‘responsibility’
is daddy’s code-word for slavery––
and ‘choice’ is a commitment
to someone else’s options––
her song knows no suggestion is ever independent––
even nature is calculated artifice––
petals lure the bee on to the stamen
by a false coloring & the bee alights
on the arbitrary flower and fertilizes the field
and in its ‘freedom’
does the bidding of a calyx.
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Tim Keane
Tim Keane is the author of the poetry collection Alphabets of Elsewhere (Cinnamon Press, 2007). His poetry has been published widely in the US, UK, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand. His writing has won awards from The National Endowment for the Arts and The Bronx Council on the Arts. He is currently writing a book about the
poetics of autobiography. He lives in New York City.
