among vinegar tasters’ ticklish feelers
scratching at sides of
                                          coquettishly
echoing
                vats,
                          besmirched with illegible lees,
  like fruit flies flounce about hobbling knees
               for an burbling port of entry,
                                  a glowing egress,
                                  some ulcerous suture stressing
            a tongue upturned in bewildered bdelygmia,
            crankworked words incensed
            by some sovereign’s suffering
            muses glumly suffused like

            golden kernels,
            bluish doubloons of a blossoming eucharist,
                                      misty-eyed nome de plumes
            begrudgingly smudged into griseous
                                                          dishwater,
            treacly tang of char and pine tar,
            hazed and graven greige
            of ablated erasers,
            of some plump painter’s gums
            who lapped at the back of a nacreous landscape,
                        suckling oily orts from discoloring corners,
                         saturnist, thinned amid watery borders,
                         smoke bled luridly bittersweet
                          orange and stoked about jaunty stocks
                           obscured,
                                       like milky sap,
                                       the body but hard tack,
                             verdigrised lacewings honeycombed
                              over the broken band
                               of a moldering donut,
                                a wriggling iris set in an
                                 interference blue, in a prattling aspic,
cataracts buff as a blistering snakeskin
curled into smirking nigredo again and again and a gain and

there,
where misery festers less than
grapes immured in a mordant must,
a fussily bustling tussock of knock kneed stars
distrusted, crowding the puckering scowl of this
cracked concoction, scrunched in the buttery tack,
like sniggering nymphs impinged in a blistering back,
                   of Death bid, everlasting, galloping crack
as the hackneyed, clockwork Turk, who’s
attuned to, among those myriad movements,
dandle his horse across every space but once,
                                and leave no spaces spared:

the arc of an orrery, maybe
a speak-and-say counting or
incantating the manifold shapes of a soul,
the unsoundable husks foretold to be
more than merely muttering dust,
the mechanical hand of Death enslaved, betrayed
by a hiccuping huckster locked in a
                    clockwork curio cabinet—

what was his name, who
spoke of those things that Heidler stole
before he had stolen them, German,
bawdy mustache, harped about
demons urging a ewe to lurch over (aloft of the)
stiles ad nauseam, dawdling, damned;
who Kubrick’d sketched as a beaming baby,
a light bulb lost in the froth of space
and desperately seeking a socket—
He’d never lived here. Once,
he’d visited, briskly, took of the Indigo
Village’s warbling corn and clover
something akin to an Eden, even
though, as we speak, the merciless
horsemen streaking unspeakably bareback over
the paddocks impinged and pinned
with weather-sealed strip malls picked from the
codfish ball, are sprinkling
lamed and diminishing germs and grain
with the thoughtless dross and illegible dandruff flicked
from a thankless, rank, and eternally
turbid flame they’d nicked from the home-goods section
ripped from the flickering guts of a sunken targ—

kudzu cuddles the brows of a proud estate
as dermestids tickle a slate, a plate
of some busted skull thrust under
a rug of aggrieved and crapulent clover,
and why my cat keeps bringing me snakes and
why I‘ve related so deeply with gnats and dragonflies
buffing their eyes against scuffed and impervious glass and
salad and breadsticks, everlasting! 
bottomless pancake breakfasts here at
weed for days and days and
how should I make it a thing of the past and
how should I go about sniffing the glue from scrapbook and