Theogaloam
(synastry reeling red
as a tetchy obsession with tangling thread
and absolving knots beyond ponderous gullets
of aglets pecking at mother-tucked husks of a seedbed)—
Theogaloam,
what sniggering lampposts speak and
concede at dusk to the corkscrewing
fireflies spryly trepanning a blistered chin,
the simpering possum’s shin now
aroar with serratia marcescens mistaken
for tartly laboring legions of leprous
ketchup—
theogaloam,
sigh of a craftsman’s malcontent
when prying the fly from the marmalade,
bass strings whingeing angels crimp around
moments of woefully treacly simplicity,
cat’s allowing mere moths to live,
and the prickling din of a city
come Christmas Eve, the trash cans
toppled, reprieved, and sweetly
repurposed to furnish a log flume—
theoga loam,
more than a quickening sense of a sticky agenda,
crickets colluding with cryptic stars
arranged to rekindle in clamorous tar,
in macadam bid ambered and amply scalped,
those prowling hordes of bloodhounds quietly
cleaving with wheezing prows the calamitous
static once sieved to seem maybe like
this and that,
the salt of the Caspian, clabbering milk fat
woven to more than a souring cloud, a
vision enshrouding some finicky cryptid
gilt, prophetic, imperiled—
the oga loam,
smiling miles from hell or home
interred in a tarrying locust,
wisteria’d thorns the dully stuttering
gar teeth clung along teats of a marigold
lamppost gargling ardent nymphs
and summoning, but as mere recompense,
these twisted soles of their sister stars
to smudge among buttery dust and alacritous
shadows those harrowing hymns of the famished
dermestids licking the scythe aglint and
steering but peaking weeds to bay
as coyotes rasp at infecund escarpments,
as shadows thrash and thrum at collapsing
scowls, and, crassly as sycamores howl,
demurring to turn in their half-dead dances
Brahmin and dryads derived from a simpering
starling’s psalm,
or the owl’s epistles as
shrill and fulfilling as stammering lampposts
yawn—
and long to dissemble a white-knuckled sunset.
2 thoughts on "Theogaloam"
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Your imagery is wild, at some points unhinged. You make the reader feel as if they are careening through an unknown world inside our own. I particularly love “teats of a marigold,” “dissemble a white-knuckled sunset,” and “corkscrewing fireflies.”
A Rollercoaster ride in wonderland
Stupendous imagery and meter.
My child’s mind says
Again ! Again !