Some day
I will be a dead ringer elderly Saint-John Perse homunculi,
Æsop in hindsight, multicolored quotidian physiog:
Red (I am the fruit of the hawthorn),
Yellow (I am a jacket of flying stinging-things),
Blue (I am the babbling brook, bubbling),
Green (I am a clover of four leaves, hiding behind blades of lush),
Purple (I am a happy romp through an anti-hero’s heart),
Orange (I am an incombustible sun, buttering your bread),
Rambling along now
Playing chess with Ariadne in a labyrinth of glisten
In an air to conquer the unordinary,
Arrows flying all about my salmon-flopping body
of muscadines before theatre queues,
tough-as-nails rusty sails saying—
“My name near the border of sanity;
Fantasia-conscious orator,
having, in one sense, great sounds
of the enchanted celestial Celesta
in the ear... who can know it?”
Chessboards, then,
are smeared through my mind as if thumbtack-pushed
by angels into my reverie.
This snow,
like the earth
posing nude.
The windows
are still-lives
of frozen wind
flicking golden
flecks of waves
& then
a pitiful white moth
flew
between us
like a fly
in a shadow
suddenly flying
into the sunlight
becoming
a diamond
in my peripheral:
a subtle stab
to the
consciousness.
Heart afloat above Urquhart Castle
said the Rook to the King
who frowned to find his crown
on my head, so he took hold of
Socrates’s cup of hemlock
& with a frivolous proposal
offered me the first sip in which
I slipped Mithridate into it
to survive beyond the poison,
to show sympathy to mystery
& antiquity like The Loch Ness
Monster finally becoming
“unmasked out of an unending
combination of masks”—
a revealing like Aphra Behn
rising from obscurity surpassing
our own deaths in jetstreams
of stillness.
Where art differs from the charmer,
the flattering sting dips Saturn in a red rose
(laying on it)—gaudily chums trounce open
the floodgates; purveyors’ persuasion has
its own smoked hams; zany, unthwartable,
palpably ripe nonsense—half-exposed breasts
out of habit stuffed beyond the caress of the
wrong bull—[CUT]: Scintilla arrives in ripples,
the redolent shift of a poem, like a memory,
like this poem turning its doggone woebegone
towards some sumptuous Halcyon, where
chrysanthemums amuse a woman’s tiny baby,
where mauve melodrama no longer irritates
blarney tautology—let’s butcher the relics,
let’s be bodies so soft that suede siphons out
our flesh; let’s be like a pond of feathery lilies
that unveils gold-colored filtered light outward
as if created from glass—archetypes of puddled
conflations—while bringing back labyrinthine
reflections of moiety from the offing, built upon
generation after generation, while our sempiternal
lips of crystal tastes every projection, as swans
vacate within your spirit, preventing your descent.
A dog with (mutt)on chops
dragging a piece of pork around in a yard
full of tulips lipping every soundwave across
my mega-powered irreducible hand-mirror
lapped up the moment like the water in the bowl
while I watched scenes of families play-out
in suburbs across fences, across faces, tresses
and bricked hideouts with my mouth opened
& out of the warm beyond, a voice like a
river-charm called out to me in a panic
& I felt the blindspot in my head fill up
with a pouring glow like a Renaissance
& the words “Look out!” simultaneously rang
at that very moment that a spasmic sound
of a weapon firing off sent the unwilling bullet into
the rabid animal’s flesh (not the dog) that had
charged at me without a sound like a red-raged bull
& I collapsed like a bell-tower destroyed by war
but yet still sounds-off as if coughing up its own
dusty rubble like a vocal harking-hearkening
setting me free on the piercing tunes of freedom’s
dirty ring.
I think of draining the swamp
so as to reveal The Swamp Thing;
Gatherum stripped away for good or
would it be a She-Thing of the Mississippi?
Diversity twitches like a nerve on a
beachless shore. I am poised for a
glancing blow. Gamma-rays under arrest
through my reproductive organs.
Booby-traps chomping us up like
bad teeth brittled. I think of building
a wall as tough as beavers, as beetles,
as spangles out of blooming fluctuform
windspeed dripping airplanes across
the phosphorescent Thought, Why not,
I speculated a width of the way. Inspected
gadgets gone in their former spaces, but
We want something more. We always
want something more (with mathematical
forked-tails to be hero of all). I want to be
arrowing the earth; a life-force of blank
bullet holes bursting through a body
of feathers. I crawl out of the swamp
like some Cenozoic creature of heaven
in the form of a rough Pacific surge
reclaiming myself like a serpent
in the presence of eagles.
