In the molasses slur of a beer-sodden craftsman, 
minding a chain-smoked fire at dawn.

“We stain the glass
  as teetering rieslings
  rise or sclera sallows in sickening vintage. 

  It’s more than a fork in the road we ford
  or a fork afforded mussel or millet.
  Far more than a nod or a no

  or a sunken shoulder turned from chillingly sterling
  frames that feed at a breakneck pace
  amid reeling spindles Moirai mind

  and tease with a smoldering sprig or snee—
  some darling dream
  or the soured morass of milkwood

  summoned to mule and mop and
  mewl and mope and mull and 
  map an alacritous tragedy. Yet

  the choice is trim as a silkworm, 
  thin as the pits beleaguering slippery
  strips of slim and sensitive film:

  An ant, be it black or red or orange,
  who slipped as a tear of McKenna 
  (a dithering daub of dew that’d
   
    groped about brazen biers that
    bound and wound round moribund
    growth unchecked or an ant cathected)

  slipped through an eddy of orange juice, 
  fished with a balsa skewer from a tacit carafe,
  must suckle its husk as a cat’s tongue polishes 

  toe beans pinker than flustered cheeks;
  or the bleary-eyed lapper of gutrot reds
  scrapes Ezra’s petals from wobbly costards, 

  punctures the freckling pith of a honey crisp 
  twice, to snuffle an odorous lotus and
  whisper amidst the dissembling darts of
  mosquitoes, venomous spittle of snipes
  and snipers pitted in grimacing poplars—

  Another costard bruised
  still fit for a fritter or golden tart 
  fell fresh from the apple cart:

  Whereas John-boy’s lethean fiend,
  in a pearling glare of impeccable prowess, 
  sucked in prised and tenuous eyes
  to ever observe his apse in a sparkling skull,
  resplendent with blithering mirrors, 
  lithe as a disco ball unnerved and everted;

  our ant upturned from orange juice
  drums its spindly ears across glistening concrete,
  ever reflecting the rhythms of rapturous stars

  or maybe the rap of a raven,
  maybe young Page’s graven flats that frenzied
  flusher than children’s cheeks—

  So I raise my glass to our sister star 
  (resigned to the borderlands blotting arboreal
   kens) and dandle its blinding bands 

  in a shimmying playa of riesling, 
  pinning its pieces, pale as the pliant snow
  or poplars pulped and pressed to impressionless paper,
 
  (split on the hip of a wine flute)
  into these scintillant scenes of starlings
  squealing, pealing, reeling, bloody
 
  malingering bright as a bloodletted pine
  or a sugarfoot lapping the babka,
  bogs of milk, and the honey-combed cataracts

  yellow as jonquils, yellow as burst cocoons.”