Mike Dockins Brief Bio Mike Dockins was conceived in a chicken-wire box slanting toward Saturn. In 1980 his eyeballs swelled to globes, each iris sloping like the Yucatán. While other boys were smooching Melissa Rose, he was wetting the bed, one hand snug inside a centerfielder’s mitt. He oversleeps oversleeping—arising a full day behind—so there is no such thing as news. He composes for subway trains & ballgames, a tireless album of clacking & cheers. In 1996 he built a pet-supply warehouse from bile & broken clocks, tail-finned though aquarium hangovers. He balanced a pouch of catnip in each lung because there was little else to do. The depth of evening sighs bounced back in sonar. Beer cans split open like protons. In 1945 half of his DNA was swimming in a wartime womb. The other half romped through Alexandria, each helix whipping the Milky Way to a sublime spin. It’s still going. He has claimed Melissa Rose is a fiction. As trilobites gulped across Paleozoic ferns, the planet was turning helplessly toward him. In 1971 he arranged his quarks into neat rows & columns, a pattern for solitaire. Forty weeks later he popped a balloon, began filling another—the universe expanding away on every side. He’s currently tying this balloon to a pine branch lest it rise out of reach of Melissa Rose: her fictive lips, her fictive tennis shoes. In 1978 his lungs bloomed into lenses. A telescope soon sprouted from his chest & swallowed Melissa Rose. She tumbled down the shaft, busted her ankle on the reflective mirror. She’s still there, peering across ribs she thinks are stars….
Dockins
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