I’d never be Lorca.
I wasn’t that sensual.
Maybe they’d hang me
in Franco’s Spain still, just
for humming a Brecht song or
something or arguing
I was a butterfly, too. A
butterfly and a human and also a
Jew somehow, god willing. Now, say, the most
sensuous I could become was
brushing off ants from ticklish shins
while roasting a bone on the stoop of a bourgeois
running shoe depot, handing out samples, saying,
with less than a restive twitch of the eye kicked
in, like Milton’s Satan wills it, pressing
his breast to the snowblind firmament
forged from the dross and dandruff of deepening
dreams that all of this birdsong shoals
and the stocks fold up into mollusk-stuffed jelly rolls,
saying, in stricken, astringent smoke
of some bone sucked into a dervishing silkworm, Hey
there, buddy, you got a light?
which spurs the sun
to redouble in blushing
beneficence, licking
my shins raw
—though I might notice it now and again
and again, a few square surds squeezed
out of my blistering ears and rolled
down ash-doused freckles and
flagstones, cheeks, slipped under the
itchy and splintered saloon-door teeth,
through the moorfowl dabbling
grumbly grubs from gums, to scud
across spit-slick surf and, clumsily
tucking their tails in, rolling the oily
mole-tacked flesh back over circuitous sinew,
shoulder some cumbrous tongue
like a scab-sopped-sponge scrunched swaddling
alice blue pinafore pancake batter, injera, or
pregnant soap-scum, trying,
and know, for the life of me, trying
to milk from that last rasped acned crackle of ash
just smashed with a sole across sinewy concrete
anything, anything scarcely dissembling
some frank feeling my half-breeched shins had
gleaned from a kidney-stoned heath of Floridian
coral and matcha-whisked salt-lick,
bristling grass blades cast all
silvery slate by a storm-choked star and the
sprite-slight jadeite burs blown plumper than
blackberries throttling nattering bramble,
urchins disturbed and everted to coddle and claw up
most any old spindly shin thrust forward, gayly
awaiting the rain and counting aloud all the countless
grass blades maybe
a nervous mind might cud
to contentiously orgying
factions of halberds and
scabbards.
