Should every moment seem
so exceedingly salient, every
strident stride which Sisyphus
steadies or stirs the stone with, every
smile gone simper gone quivering rictus
wrenched round which black blot of
a blossoming blood bruise; how or why
should I shy from the pin-prick sentiments
thrust from the bustling precipice, not note
weeds gnawed clean through impossible
concrete, seize not snickering surds shaped
under the stuttering weight of a scraping sole,
nor heed no starling’s psalm that charts among
all the mere crumpling ether, the wind weighed,
crimped by a buckling breath to the breast
of a stuttering steel drum; just some simple song they’d
gusseted into La Habenera—
l’amour and l’amour all the more so?
The road before me, which wan wake
of a fish-tailed chain of cross-eyed pharaohs,
the beck and call of but slobbering chalk dust
chipped from a hare-lipped plinth, this fizzling
trail run ruinous, threadbare, silvery, gilt
as a sickle-shaped scar slipped under the stomach
that deepens and thickens and gums
up the eyes and ears with every stone steered
straight, scrubbed over and over where one might’ve
druthers to skip it out over the edge where the
sunken scree’s left chuckling, hungrily
grumbling under the bristling shadow’s scurf
cramped, clotted or cocked upon maybe mere black-
berry bramble or juniper thatched to a
creekside cottage adjoining a cabbage patch—
Should it’ve taken much more
than some sour weed curled
to a simple simper slipped ‘twixt
chockablock teeth of a nauseously
cross-armed sidewalk, groping
its ticklish ribs for an anxiolitic;
to usher me, sling my stone out over the undulous edge—
or an arduous raindrop clopped across testy flesh
like a dense sledge slumps through cinder blocks,
maybe a blood bruise beckoning,
roll away the stone already and
ecce homo, presto chango, see
how your lips curl over with flickering
sheepweed, there, in the moire of the
stone-stuffed riverbed? Yet,
what comes of it
if I should throw it
and not let got of it—
