Some hanta-riddled pellet fell
or so i thought
a pill bug maybe
filliped from my pocket
pip or pill bug
putrid pellet plucked—
i pressed my pen’s matte pate
exposed of a marmalade’s tone
or a marigold’s lickerish hue
the sun still stickily sweetens
smooshed ‘twixt tempered pane
and a squirrel’s chest
pressed its saccharine pate upon the pellet
pip or pill bug maybe, maybe
a weed’s wry petal charred
roast artichoke green or a murky olive
straddling now my pen’s orange pate
mere threadbare lengths from flickering fingers—
nitrile, maybe Mylar
cinching spindly wrists,
red grooves betwixt
lanugo parted somberly
as sickened citrus stocks succumb
and collapse among canker’s cross,
necrotic busses; caustic peroxide gnawing
pink and puckered flesh to shrieking rime incensed
like glaucous dandruff stinging scalps erupt in,
picked and scored, or, more so, erode to
prickling plumes that ransack supple shafts of
starshine, farrows of niggling vermin blearing
much as constellations scar a sky akin,
above ocherous street lamps,
more to obsidian denim than sequined satin
some may say it whilom was ‘fore erstwhile fires sprawled,
like dusty tussocks clot and loiter ‘long burnished linoleum’s curling coolth—!
this astringent promise flesh inflamed,
raw worries wrinkle, chew, and chafe;
that swears at a langouring lordship’s
pale and shaven peplum’s hem unstitched,
from wizening gleams of a horse-hide halter’s creases,
gromets gouged from blood-lacquered buskins,
knots among groped and splintered flax
some’d sworn once stoked Germanic roses
dark and thick as pulses’ viscous cruxes;
from a fine ivoried crow’s nest
storms, redundant as laces loosen,
wheedled to be but a coracle creeping—
‘Swears! by a marbled god
or some stuffed Quagga lost upon trumps
and waves of hearts and cups, or
silvered slugs deaf, puddingheaded buckshot
flaccidly flees from, swearing, “Bundling
boards, by G-d, ‘ll be back in spades
come cold October’s end!”
—bemused amid the mortise cuts.
Why giving a beggar a light illumines
prickling probes and opprobrious inquiries,
throbbing mortality’s meekly measured inseam,
steals its broken breaths some many miles shy
of old Ararat’s peak or the Bedouin shanty
Yeats once sniffed at—flickering fingers froze
before but a tender hunk of darkened pigweed.
Just scrub strange skin from disinfected thews
and shimmering tendons bubbles buff and disabuse
in pop and peal, debriding pure and pearl-licked bone
of dingy dross no polished stone should gather;
hypnotic moire of mottled fingers’ fat
a candle’s fuming blossom flenses,
shell-frail shale some stammering shoreline’s
skirmishes cud, foment, and cripple;
suppuration froth incensed from bayed, rare, reticent,
superstitious sands our Aloads’ shaper smeared:
such extravagant monsters stretched from sullied stone
i’ll scrape from waning nails i’m here afeard of nibbling
for a wile, ‘fore erstwhile flickering fires sprawl
to boil these greasy seas and oceans clear as inviolate Mylar.
