On a pearl-husked helmet rolled

from the feet of young Venus,
          playing at coy pisacoca, 
 a cat’s-eyed dollop of agate
 gone marzipan muddled with
              hoof-glue and glossy cardstock, VOID
     written over and over, a sweat-seized
     aspic of antinoise parting through parties of 
     gut-gouged guppies gone groping abreast of a
     crackling eddy of Love is the Drug left
        stumbling under a peg-leggéd needle; 
 they say he’s a wren with Tourette’s—he’s
 volleying scraps of infectiously snickering    
 wisdom, xylophone notes like jolting jokes shot
 deep in the ether, rebounding, in time, as the
 wrynecked oak trees might just wince in trying
 to tickle the victuals from wriggling Cygnus, might just 
 comb out that bristling knap of some barking 
 bar fight into what prayer-shy sparring of cardsharps 
 slowly uncurling their earliest memories over
 precarious cardstock ziggurats—VOID 
 hemmed in to a yawning Celtic knot, 
 all the roiling borderlands, green 
 as the inchoate blueberries bulge beneath fading 
 flowers, flint-scraped V’s and D’s the same, all 
 curled in a gar-toothed, t-squared eddy encircling 
 what wan glair of which smoothed and buoying
  storm’s eye pinned between scrofulous,
                                                         stalk-soft I’s, a man-
     dala debrided
     from cabochoned skulls 
     of ten-thousand or so
     old, half-drunk bodhisattvas, rolling their
     bones against broken escarpments, teasing,
     of anything even resembling cancer, a shrew
     slopped over a stoop or a catfish barbel
     enticed to a thrashing knot, some curious 
     dollop of peppercorn fondant topping
     a juiced gorgonzola—just buttermilk,
     peppercorn, Golden Day feather-weight
     cream, and the leoparding cheeses, growth; 
                        he’d picked his poison—
     this is what all of his ground-scored bones were
     woven of, after all, happily having once Harpo’d,
     a parakeet fleeing some cross-armed column of 
     honeycombed classrooms squashed in the trebling 
     chin of a chalk bluff, urged 
     his own flat feet and nose and scalp
        clean over the outpost’s eaves, bent
        girding the Alamo over
        the varicosed rails, the sluggish graffiti parlors,
        the shrunken clubs, the wilting loy, the red rocks. 
                                             Always just
                                              having just                 washed,
 
he shook off his helmet and sat it beside me, VOID
like a psychic eye now tightening 
bolts in the bulging throat of whatever 
odd godling not so distant New Guineans 
calmly declaimed all the universe once would’ve
burst through the throat of 
                              in echoes of 
ticklish liget, greng jai, grim awumbuk,
trembling—knives
combed, oenomel, clean
through the treacly petering ether. Remember
 
how Fergus surrendered the crown to the murmurous
surf, so as he might carelessly bubble in bursting mirth
                                           like the chalk-scrawled cornsilk
                                           numbly encumbering
                                           frog spawn, wracked
          like pool balls cracked to a trace of the chilblained 
        Jesus, Vonnegut, Frankl, Haeckel, Divine, a 
      sugar-scrubbed, sage-smudged g. g. allin,
     those Fine Young Cannibals chewn 
    to a poultice of tsentsak and litmus paper—so,
   with his tooth-wan helmet doffed then,
 what would old Norman Sexton 
                  explode in-to? Maybe
 
that small dark clot that the universe 
slopes toward, sure as recanting tides, or perchance
this quaint, beige, leathery, prattling, albinist batwing 
all the blue ashes erupted from, butane
chafed into what frail flame containing
the oily whole of Antarctica, snickering butane
milked of but crackling plastic
mule-kicked into the muttering tongue
of the universe splayed as illegible forest fires
must stop to, befuddled in awe, chew fat
with the crows and gawk with the black-eyed 
hollyhocks throttling oak stumps, keening butane 
kneading in ash this gashing germ 
of an heirloom crabapple sapling—all of this
crepe de chine skin and pith and inveterate cyanide
pertly debrided from all of those
wasp nest talks with the chockablock 
backsplash, slapdashed shrapnel packed
with the whirligig skulls of some thousand
forgotten young soul singers
stirring the birds still—skull
like a concrete conch shell echoing squarely
in poetry parsed into breakneck scat
and the scattershot splutter of reeds split
sifting from traffic and weathered rattan
what floundering panpipes bent in a blistering engine.