Apprentice Collector

With a kazoo melody
A vagrant invites
My soul in his box
For a drink of rye

The long neck
Of the bottle is bloody
My soul’s lips
Are painted midnight black

But before it can drink it
Browses his collection
Of rodents’ incisors
Little caged Popes

Patent truth serums
Severed hands locked
In Jack in the Pulpits
Come deeper inside

Says the bum with his song
Here is a petrified child
Here is my embalmer’s pump
A mistranslated Book of the Dead

Descartes hand-blown glass eye
All the things I have collected
From an eternity
On the empty street

He readies his instruments
And pours the dark fluid
And my soul takes its place
Under his trembling dust rag