(This jouska-jostled jaw, how our stammering Rifleman
misses his shuttering shadow’s Crown
or coxcomb cramped against snickering dapple—)
What did they do about weeds in Eden?
Crack—
a twisted rib,
a tumbling breath of bats and birds expelled from a canopy,
thick as a viscid sneeze;
the malingering, milky stillness stuck
in dispersing smoke, a spindly sprig
of a dour and doll-like visage
triced above stickily pothering gunmetal nostrils
Cough—
tepid and meek as wilted daisies
balled in a quailed and sweat-slavered palm,
the blithering click of a quivering wrist resounding
crass as obnoxious clockwork
Cough. Ahem. Ahimsa.
What redoubling glories
clumsily flung from a
blunderbuss butting
a pulsing chest— Our Hunter’s walks amid godless prophets
curled among crusted and crumb-filled pockets;
hymnals loaned from young roans or Peabody
woebegone, louring, low,
self-pity’s disastrous physiog flexed
in mumbling fumbling measures he’s
clipped at the neck like a pensive bitch
must punish precocious pups;
in rummaging crackling wrappers
from a torn pocket pursed
with jagged clots of
brittlely jonquil’d tissues
tucked ‘twixt bruxist prophets puckering,
stuffily chuckling, huffily buckling,
muffily knuckled, and crustily bungled cheeks,
he sees the encircling, scintillant tones,
the seven there surged from red to B,
and, gnashing his tedious tack of
salted flour frothed to a glaucous quartz,
he assays the astringent stumps
and sleaves of disrupted rings
this sussing, this sagging unsuccorous song:
What one milksop swore to be battery
as he bleached his shriveling tome
within the caustic pores of flattery,
what once had beleaguered a coral throne
that’d flourished from muliebrity
as the pear intertwines with the cactus ear,
that a lady had disappeared,
had sluiced through ponderous, argent loyalty,
had rendered not a moiety
to he who thought he her Caesar—
see her blooming on the bough there,
see her rotting where the rabbits go,
that chipper, green Rusalka
one caught coughing through her comb—
Oh, know this as flat a farce
as the Lord of Capricious Tarts.
Then recall the stolen child and her childish heart arraigned,
pry redundant curls from a rimed appendage
threshed from red horizons raked—
See, laws can cleave the sticking smoke
into two well-groomed forelocks forked
and, drawn to cull at cold scattershot slag
debrided, incensing engorging blemishes
pricked to a puss, embroiled in intimate
powder, shells, and confabulous fetishes,
recoiling from flashpan promises, lo!
grand auspices forgotten, so
should a murder seem so rotten when
a crow is flayed and garnished?
from these friends that plague thee thus
and that catholicon of trust, ensured,
Oh know this as flaccid a farce
as the Lord of Capricious Tarts— unnerved.
Now, of he who said she shot him, brother,
bother not redounding us, or yet again reprising thus
such frothing, periphrastic fits.
I know your contempt for the kitchen sink
and relish for martyrs’ bones and unctions
thonged in brioche and a pickled compunction;
Please, for the sake of these tremulous shadows
sashayed and sloshed by a somber step,
peel trebling metal from troubled wood,
and should she wish to kiss frogs or newts,
know it all as elaborate a farce farcie
as there being a lord of most anyone really
—
Then the arc recoiled in trees contented,
nacreous fumes unraveling,
sewn amid snickering dapple’s staggering two-step—
a glimmering filigree riddled with sounding twitches
that tease at sepulchral thunder,
blasts of a blunderbuss,
spirited surds but a nourishing ear
might cradle to blissfully bussing, combustible music.
