(title above or below you)
Manalive‘s
what the exorcist muttered
when noting the threadbare
seams pitched twixt the
planes, like flickering sister cities,
a vanity using a vanity, trying
to bore out a bulging blackhead, broad
as a rotting and cross-armed potato barn—hmph,
still—summoning deep
as a back-cracked sneeze
might leech from a
herniated, otherworldly portal
some sulfur-sick tatter of fly-tape
juggled to mite-flecked fawn’s flesh, flush
with a finicky litter of bristling Ithacans (wondering
whether they’d left the horse yet, or
had it been just so hot in there maybe
the whole damned thing was a
pollen-flogged fever dream)—summoning
deep as your throat should allow in a
dowdy yawp from the breast of that
low-rent Brocken pinched up proud of
the floundering trash barge, scarcely
a ghostship sloop left scratching the
dandling eye of some restive sea
hellbent on suspending a skittish sneeze that
threatened to horse-kick all of the pin-head
ports of the molten Pacific to sawdust
sand and marshmallow fluff, this bruxist
hull of these tetchy obsessions with echoing
pantomime parents or forebears fixed
into mordant frogspawn smudging
the sun into what was no less
than interminably total
eclipse—just
summoning,
much as one might sweat
all of those scattershot slugs
of redounding Ballantines charting
the chilblained night like stars snuffed
blacker than gravel that’s cracked from but
cow-cudded hematite clenched long the bubbling
euxine—summoning
what foul phlegm left fleshing
another smug, cross-armed, stop-
and-frisk, wax-lip appraisal of
everything stenting a face, of every
star and shell and shaving I’ve gravenly
whip-stitched into a fringe, crimped
cilia-slick around what weird thread,
what veins and blame and frameless flotsam
each little itch of a name
was embroidered with. Albeit, baldly
embroidered in what warped fabric?
Fabric :
moire of the world now scarred
like an eye-gouged Jasper Johns piece,
trying to bury no more than its own
warped moire worked up into
cherry-snuffed frogspawn, dashing
the scattershot birdsong back, so
flush and unplumbably, beautifully
shapeless; back into but a few
white-knuckled bones cracked,
trying to pick out the sharps
from the flats and the fence slats—
what’s left lolled ‘twixt dervishing worlds
that Bowie bid blue and green in egregious
car crash? What’s left wiring irises—what
strange thing is unspeakably
seam-ripped be-
tween them—what
great guiding glare or gait
of the whispering
featherweight tissue
tucked in a mazing matryoshka,
twiddled to gobs of rock or columns
of smoke or every threadbare sheathe
that the tongue keeps burnishing
into this breakneck dishwater velveteen
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The depth and level of wordography you achieve with your poetry always leaves me a bit awestruck. You have this deep well of cultural/mythic imagery and an ecosystem of language that’s so rich. Love “the/planes, like flickering sister cities,/a vanity using a vanity”