--- S T A N D A R D   S C H A E F E R

The room erodes into tables and sofas.

A lowering of the voice.



An oval rises from a cake, bare breasted in a way that rivals music, and
flops out around the table -- her scales covered in scabs, her tail a
talented prosthetic --

limousines are hostile cake, she says as she turns, coughs
and then goes on with the tease, to hell with horns, I am looking for
the ones with talons.

And then beneath the smoke from the tail pipe and dints in fancy metal,
appearing again before the lens (10)

an entire cake eaten by face of one
who in the end relents to the dismantling,
that is, she swallows the slab she has mistaken for a mood,
and says, Who hovers is a stone on the other side of the lens,
but I am elsewhere looking for a sun that melts my cake, for a star that
creams me.



______________________________

(10)  On this point, both audience and author agree to defer to a certain
optometrist, who despite his fluency in Latin, managed to define the
imagination as thus:  the world plus the idea of an internal cause.  Love,
he also wrote, is obviously pleasure plus the idea of an external cause.
On the question of whether or not this implise that he was an adder or an
author, the two sides are split.