the lapidary artist defends her
disco ball, the hiccupping spalls of
oyster shells and slug trails, glibly
commissioned by Franz Kline’s
cousin now twice removed
from the family trust or will: still
kicking the horse into
pablum, grass, and grist,
must I thus
seem so contemptibly kinked
to say the same small thing some
thousand louring times ’til somebody
shake me, saying it
back in but hardscrabble pig latin,
filling the knock-kneed white or the
black of the rorschached in-
cantation in, the
roads still cudding the
same four
tires square—un-
moved, reproved, un-
godly, and plotting out
doddering trots of a blood-
clotted endgame— (counter
melody)
clock-wise,
I’m
so busy
bent wondering
why my soles still itch
to pick out the pungent nigredo from
fallowing road tar, chockablock
borders contorting the
hull of the warbling
world into crep-
itant pitches in-
censing a bar
brawl’s diss-
onance; all
too sorely attuned to a chortling rock-
tumbler, teasing of gravel this endless
soap’s salve (shrill as a cross-eyed so-
prano’s empowered to whistle as moo-
n glow smoothed down lapis skies
or the bubbling thighs of a whale sprawl,
stoplight mirepoix sawing some torpid
chord, asea with just too many clenched keys de-
pressed),
to make much sense of Sibelius splintering
tones of a swan’s swoln breast bone buckling,
flipping the bird as the water-logged log stirs
round and
round, bald
tires un-
wound a-
round raveling mud in a
gutted attempt to grope
blood from a maxim that Rumi’s
acolyte’s
acolytes’
acolytes
passed as a conch-
kinked transcript of
sand-blasted sanskrit a
bandy-legged bodhisattva, gargling
change into little brown garlic pills, once
promised us might just salve that souring skin-
condition one’s soul’s suspended in
more than merely taking
Sibelius in for a few
scratched turns of his sobering
soul suspended in rattling plastic.
Harry S Truman enters
in plain clothes, hissing
his alphabet forwards,
backwards, black, and
white, still gathering what
were they calling those little
black mushrooms pitting the
skull of admonished Chernobyl;
Lilliput’s gods require a
smoke ring strangely trace
and sustain some cinching shape
of a dog track, stuck in its thirteenth lap and
lashed round what lapsed step-
ladder’s seventh or seventeenth
stammering step again, playing
at penitent dumbwaiter—
