My coffee mill quietly cudding at blackened beans,
raw wooden wheel unwound through ancient Grecian islands
gilt and unsettled in glorying verse and the clashing ignominies
nobly gnawing at rashed and raddling ravels, 
entangling tangs of irascibly wrung and irremeably roughened ruts
of irreparable ears, 
embattled in pickling years amid fickle kingdoms
cramped among overblown warlords’ chillingly chasmic cauls
and the cosmic barroom brawls ‘twixt godless tapsters
teased by the prickling powers proudly preening
among a young muse’s tongue—

Below where young Erato sat upon crumbly crags
with a flurry of flickering click beetles clasped around lowly groping lobes
that swept from the sun-plundered, brittle, dismissive dust,
which nettles and nurses still scarce scars of sage brush,
quivering traces of succulent birdsong
plopped about feathering trails of worms and grubs;
sounds bright as a child might drub and
stamp from a slippery shadow some whimsical
physiog’s indigo’d pearls of slurring wit and unparalleled lineaments
lingering, ageless, fixed, forgott
-en in baffling rites, amid rotten cotton batting
snuffed and stuffed against sensitive drumskins
dampened, deafened, dead, percussed and punctured
husk of a sallowed cicada who, sloughed
from but one golden moment
shreds of impeccably scaling arpeggios 
pitted in measureless ledgers of 
rough and illegible bark 
and indelible
dirt.

This cockcrow echoing, “Who Made Who”,
bedraggled in raggedy crocks that
caustic coughs of a boombox bumbling verdigrised
rifts of emphatically classic rock
debrides from the silenced static sleaved
from steelwound trellises trammeling airwaves,
pickling clouds with the proud rapport
among lovelorn children and louring troubadours;

starlings tickling prickling weeds 
with alacritous hymns among slumbrous reeds,
which pursing lips, unclasp and rasp
from abashedly chattering, shore-slumped stalks;

what winding jazz amid caterwauls clowders crane
above staritlaced motorists’ murderous brays
and the turgid purs of an overturned engine
nettled in knowing it’s nothing that new to spew or say,
glib chatter of timeless pistons splayed;

the queasily squealing saws
of a cussing triumvirate trading
a truss for a pillar;
the Lydian mode, 
old gags for Phyllis Diller,
slumping Thalia encumbered in crumbling stone
still swaddled in impishly simpering lichens.