Craven Jay Mogumbsey
(sheds yet a shred of his
clenched and stridulous soul,
still chasing that stalwart rhyme
of a story left supine, forcing
         a chafing breast stroke):

Wet rags and ribs of pervasive sentiments pinned
in the holed up, tarred and feathered, and plucked,
obscenely corroding pall of a murmurous sternum
incensed, alas, at last, to
                                             open—
                                         to let a sere feather
                                                         distend its
                                             nib in some measure of
                                             crusting blood
                and scratch across
                        runes defaced
                or mud pies maybe,

one whisper of what her pert pulse percusses.

The moon worn down to a chalky fume
or a blistering spoondrift shouldering swollen
stars she took for a rash of insatiable sigils;

and, creakily cowing, she cramped some petering pain
in a figure of baying and tolled their tortuous nicknames
over and over the broken bowl of her runcible bone, her
whilom instrument clacked across chattering teeth, her
tool for refining cantatas and straightening torpid tangos,
                                          tuning the grooves of a bas relief. And
Hear ye, hear ye.
                                Hear ye!
Hear ye, the keys
all sharp as a tack
or flat as a pin depressed
through a plugged and spluttering breast:

the owl, the starling, the tambourine,
some shimmying snare of diminutive cymbals shuffling
                                   jangly staves of a trembling
                                   dream enlaced in a creaking gait;

how the rusted greaves sloughed, nuzzling
sparks from macadam and feldspar,
                                                  teething really,
must cling to still splintering shins; or the raddle of

river stones cracked to a callus of glistening
calcite, blistering pulp of a swollen orange
once toddling fingers struggled to
pull from peel and pith, a fish in the
throes of the Mariana trench grown slim
as a grease-slopped slab of soddenly silenced parchment pitifully pitched

to furnish the din of a kitchen, the well-worn
                glow of a boisterous bardo bracing
to burst, this frankly unslakable thirst
for yet love unlaced, or something akin to it,
traced in a filliping, twilit sea of but
thrumming, unplumbable feeling, thin
as a hazing dream relayed amongst rests
abating some molten pulse of unsoundable music,
strange transcriptions strangled
                   in limp transpositions,
                      a fissure of oghams
lost in a furor of fumbling fish hooks
        bent to a litter of slippery notes—this
torpid gorget smothering scabbing gills,
the honeycombed heart that rolls up the taken hills
and beats from a curl of coal
    some tickling trill of an owl,
    or, maybe, some stuttering cymbal confused
                                                    
                                                                     for a starling.