It wasn’t enough to just

simply splutter, the moon’s
a fuming mother of roquefort; 
albeit begging it, braying so
                    wild and high, to
paw back bloated and broken
and bone-stoked tides tucked
under the pale little piddies of
 
what was a pitiless zeitgeist
pestled in paperclips, mate-
less shoes, and china hutch
death camps—albeit, give
the moon a chance, perchance, re-
clined in the scatterling eyes of but
cats and rats and bats and hunch-
backed children, winking as
slow as some juggernaut 
godling’s heart bleats 
blithering, blistering, raw. Though,
 
Carlyle gropes his napoleon 
into a pearl, and, proudly, one 
with his fist now,                   chucks it,
 
skipping off crossly across all the piquing 
spume, his soles now stitched with the pine-
tar tollund man’s tedious muscles preserved
in tire tread, staggering
                                                    ahab’s stammering
shadow pinched paler than pigeon shit, peakéd
meringue refraining from mentioning eggs 
or its free-
range chicken 
progenitors even—begging
 
the graven cliche to crack and,
tackhammer-prattling, tell us now,
which came first, the
 
soul or the spirit—