tattered bathrobe on hook

my filthy, fish-stained bathrobe
got his neck broke on the door knob,
saw things a bathrobe shouldn’t,
and has night terrors
about hangers and their wire torture. now
goes howling through my rooms, shaking
his sleeves in the kitchen
haunting over my shoulder while I scythe onions
and sizzle their corpses

my bathrobe wrings his filthy neck and hovers
in the grocery store turning over every apple
to find the bruised spot, at night
turning me this way and that
telling me of all the things different in his day
keeps me up with stories of his friend, the anorak
the time they flicked a match
and burned the whole damn house down,
why not burn the whole damn world

my bathrobe will not wash
until tibet is freed, got high at woodstock and lived
to tell the tale, tattooed flowers and peace signs
over his pockets then sewed them shut,
my bathrobe got high in the 60s and then
was nothing, the war is over and my bathrobe
doesn’t know what to do