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.
