They’d hobbled a dreamachine from Brion Gysin,
painted it black and white as zen, and then

twisted its lissome jaws to the scrumptious
grey of eidetic, despotic, and pothering pictures,

pulchritudinous nerve of a pansy drawn
to a gibbet of chrysolite,  thrawn and emerald

spires wiring Oz as the horse-kicked cheeks
of a munchkin, colors unplumbably curled

to a Mesmerist tie-dye, desiccant grey of diminishing
dishwater riddled with suppling bones and milk

teeth strewn around ocherous tendrils,

evermore gurgling lower and lower and

lowered now
                             lower
                                             again—
                                                     
                             hold your breath,
count to three,
make a wish,
let us go then—

The pleasant Patina paraded her
soles swoln sticky with flour
across which charred and charted roads,

what slippery streets where smoldering cigarettes
float as the half-snuffed stars once stirring
a firmament, snagged

about broken branches bridging but
bickering realms of a hacking ash tree,
trammeled in crackling vacuum slackly

sluiced from the eye of a dozing dog. Such
scowling macadam that cloud-shat showers
slop and soothe to a mirror’s moire
(some star had pickled and pinked to a groaning glare),

here lamplight bruises orange as a
salvaged stone-fruit’s flesh that’s splashed across concrete,
sage as a sickening squint, that buttery

greige of a smokestack gargling
crackling coals to frozen smoke.
She neared McCartney, combing

the can-studded stone with a
tinker’s raking gait, who had always
loathed her dandling pe’ots, her autumnal bonnet

ginkgo-gold or greige, her smirking affliction
glib as the rain-eaten skomorokh picking at Kiril—
thrumming primordial ribs and scratching out icons

brash as a rash of wassailing cats.
McCartney’s tabard was black,
that black of the coal-clad Cash’s sweet

and sepulchral hymnal, black as the bronze
of a death mask propped upon purling, skittish plinths.
His slacks were sewn of circuitous dictums,

deep as the moth-wan tissues worms refuse
and starched like the worming vertebrae fused
in a smarting hunch, slumped sick

as the havocking curs encoached
in a roach’s war—His face
was milky and speckled and just

as it was some sobering summers past,
once signed by the brands of burning beer signs,
chiseled with sharpening shadows

spat from the blearing blush of a cat-calling streetlamp;
teased to a winsome and secretive simper,
a wildly rattling wreath of teeth,

some twisted stare of sardonic indignance; or
settled in wriggling rue and snow-chewn ruins 
runnied with hungering mud and kudzu

ensnaring slavering squatters—and here
he seemed as a shanty leant against
listless waves and shriveling sea oats,

a shiftless rib of smoke uncoiling,
chimneys sunk to unsettling dust—
a golem of sorts, though pressed from a tacit talc

and pressed by absurdist epistles,
embittering blotter paper tacked to a tired tongue,
and the grumbling signals strummed up

scrunching ribs and the queasily capoed strings
of a warping neck and wheezing pistons;
an integument tethered in powdery pith and

embittering pips of paled pomelos
but rough and repulsive sunsets savaged—
a hollowed hare, which eclectic confectioners

cast in a batter of gin and aspirin, he
who’d forgotten the churlish gags,
the oenomel giggles of dish dogs,

braying and strange, the nicknames
nipping at tippling ankles, dragging
the staggering steps, the lamed and

belaboring gaits of poisoned putti,
rusalki sulking on warping linoleum
webbed in a watery sinew spurt from a

burbling, haggard, and cracked commode
left choking on sunken, encrusted tissue;
thrust to the wiling strides of exuberant brumbies,

mutts made one among otters and ocelots,
dryads, naiads, and godlings…
Though his cat still whispers,

Tigers of wrath are wiser, P., yes,
even than brumbies bent to be broke about
scarps or stirrups, or maundering mutts

that cock a disquieted tail against clamorous stars—
She’d then scuff stool across biting tile,
ever imperfectly parallel with but gritting grout.

They grazed in a tremulous, frantic neglect,
wan squeals of scraping skiffs that scud upon placid ponds,
like accidentals tugging meandering melodies twain,

as keys must scratch about anxious pockets
picking their preening peaks to pieces—
passed upon patchwork concrete

frolicking dogs demurred, disdained,
laid waste to—
And as the dissonance scratchily waxed,

she cobbled a conversation drawn
among puddles and potholes, drowned
as wrinkles rubbed round wind-strummed meres

by a cat’s-paw settle in pensive, speechless, shapeless smoothness

                                   :

They jawed along snickering spillways, scuffling
soles against frankensteined macadam stitched
in snakeskin tarred to a crippling stiffness.

He dreamt of the woods immured in the green
of a golf course, quivers of irons and woods
supplanting sleepily gamboling saplings rose

with a sinking star and the harrowing toes
of a whinnying ice storm—wooed some frozen feeling feeding
on twisted tongues, which a sticky aluminum clenches.

Peter McCartney waxed to a critical shrillness,
spat, “It’s A Wonderful Life? It’s a crock of shit!
It’s a dream. It’s a harrowing movie, the bleating

feed of shapeless sheeple—technically good,”

(Now, mind you, Peter McCartney here
was a sordid shadow, which thrawn and
ponderous rain’d unplumbably picked at,
no more Peter than Yeats’ da, in a meddlesome dream,
was smoothly immured in a stubborn doorknob.)

“—though it sets an unsoundable standard.”

“One where people are truly good?
It’s a beautiful movie, flickering flake
by flake. It cuts through the souring sutures

thorned through a sucked and puckering sternum…
To think it a crock of shit, you’d have to have
solely seen among mirrors scuffed

with the glair of scum-scowled witches’ windows,
sieved from the turbidly bitter bdelygmia
bubbled in troubled and gurgling potholes,

strictly a finicky specter stitched
from the stillborn teeth interred in teratomas
covering frowns inflamed by a blistering lick

of unshakable shame and a teetering
tower of louring waste where once there 
posed self-pitying Peter.” Patina

stood on a bulbous shard of tar,
the hunch of a buried domovoi
schismic, bickering, scraps of stone had,

teased by a wryly wassailing storm,
implored to the crazing borderlands boarded
with broken rock and cagey concrete,

firm as a flopped and flinching fence.
The water’d cinched to a frothing moat
but bridged by a shriveling pinch of stone.

She hunched upon Bubbleland, even the Elba
Pope once promised a flimsy farce, and
snapped her umbrella’s spine on the gurgling drawbridge:

“And as these rains irremeably rise
spurred on by a sore and insoluble sadness,
this skittering drawbridge slouches, splinters,

picks the teeth of Leviathan clean as a
typeface freckles a thoughtless leaf,
as stars explode in a moribund hunger,

leaving less than impressions
sticky as cigarettes sallowing stuffy apartments.
Have you considered Jesus, son—?

I’m kidding, although he’d have,
by far, a far better bead on things
than this.”