His tongue was a dollop of
restive texture, stippled and
penciled with little, pink,
pilled-up barbels, judging
the titer of vinegar sweeter
or evermore sour or bitter
than any old, glib, little
sip of cold vinegar should be,
should he be savoring; then
how his nose lurched up like a
grease-grey gobbet of steel-
wool, cheese-choked, cudding
the undulous gun smoke up
into wincing intentions, tethered
to buckshot flecks of femur, a
sneeze incensed to streak murder
most foul or the arc of a bruised
foul ball bent clumsily out
through the back of a throbbing thigh
with the all but ostriched intention of doing
for bones, by way of the tidldibab or the
hard-won, hard-nosed, boorish tibetan
bone flute, all of these things that Burroughs had
promised to mark with a shotgun in central
Kansas; though then his ears chewn
into an ocean of nosegays, probing
the blackstrap beds of death undone
for a scurrilous semblance of source
code, maybe, what’s more, a new
moral code woefully kenneling
gods and monsters, serfs and
saviors, maenads and magnates beautifully
bedding together and bent above even the
same chipped dish full of chittering gravy; his
eyes and pruning fingers pinched as
one, it seems, like children, plaguing
a swank Halloween party, pitiably
peg over labyrinth fingerprints
hordes of lobotomized olives, streaking
the walls with awe-wattled symbols and
sigils, which nobody seems to be able to
read—Now which or what
tender sense am I missing here,
some crude conibear brace bent over a
mad-lib, beckoning what scrunched tussock of
sensuous, wrenching numinousness should
fill it, should squeak between weirdly
preening, rat-trapped teeth of a
balding bas relief of a honeycombed
godling throttled once out of the rippling
fence slats, measures of Daphnis et Chloé?
