These summery leaves like lion’s paws
compelled to but lazily sway about breathless breezes, so
the impatient churn of a string trimmer chewing at rallying grass
or a house marm mowing her mint in a bombazine bridal train
knotted in brambling rose shrubs—  

What Orpheus heard in the din of old Otus’ elevator,
in the encyclopedic friction frobbed from a cordless phone,
in the crank of a gramophone lazily swiveling,
swimming through simmering seas of sound
and unsoundably miserable meanings mounting,
saddling sickened sturgeons,
winnowing wild whales from warmly warbling waters,
caparisoned orcas cast before battlements clashing with rallying grasses—  

Cendrars no less than a cigarette
spinning its silvery serpents sacred,
emollient, stinging, and shapeless
scales of a shore-swoln sole some staggering
gull had arranged in a strangled cipher,
tracing its holiest moments hewn
by the gormless, grape-eyed golem’s grip,
an electric goddess yoked in a herringboned carpet,
milked from acerbic, tar-tough, inchoate crystal
cracked against fires invidious, craven
gods forgave in incessantly sucked and sutured organs,
folgerphones, korgs, and wheezing accordeons;  

Silverstein’s succoring sallow sapped
to a stud, these crass and elastic surds
I’ve stripped from a street lamp’s stippling shadows,
as sweetly asemic as crackerjack ciphers
smoothed with a chittering band of purported
plastic plied with pinked and stickily
pinguid digits docked amid crackling
sockets sorely slanted across a dis-
figured horde of but sloppily cobbling
graphemes crunched in a babbling crick of il-
legible sentiment, cardamom pods like
bell buoys pitted in peppermint aspic
sprawled on a prickly bed of zesty
dolmas dredged with the sun-dried rinds of
buttery, sunken oranges’ gaunt and
glaucous cheeks and an army of ever more angular morsels
gnarled to the clinically tessellate face of an
ageless god among gods erased—