were you expecting
a soul everted
            in wet and indelicate spectacle,
pitched to the hunch of a pensive gorgon
           milking of braided snakes some
sin-colored custard furnishing
quiche Lorraine and a bedpan
                                       brimming with
                                      fresh limoncello
                             and sullen bullion bobbing
as powdery marrow expelled from a blistering spit valve— hell,

no more than a crumbling clod
that the Acheron spat across scuttling Cygnus;

this caulk-clotted caul you’ve unclasped
                                          from a blasted chin,
like sap punched fresh from a pin oak, or honeydew
tear streaks swoln ‘long louring sheaves,
                     unraveling greaves and gorgets
       pressed from lascivious spittle and splintering limbs
       you’ve pinched to dissemble the hull of some flaking friend
       or an echo of what you’ve wished you’d
       been,
                  since baffling birth throes thrust you
        forth or twain,
                                 but an instrument blunted,
                                      dulled, fordid, rebuffed
                                    by a slavering autoclave,
       
        or what army of pie-eyed dry heaves arguing
        what’s to save
                                        from a factory fire—

but woebegone suet some listing servant seized
and muddled with crusted blood to but muster
                   a lipstick, let’s dub Dog-Dick Pink,
                   or the cellulite sloughed and splayed
                   and set in some simpering splint
                   you’d mount upon yawning panes
                   of a perfectly crystal acrylic,
                   as eyes and eyeteeth preen from a beach house
                   shuttered for fear of a gaily gimping cloud,

a shrew skull strangely marooned on a sand dune,
Innisfree crudely assembled in driftwood,
husks of plastic plug-ins that stammering hermit crabs
sleepily drag across uniform crumbs
(wan leavings of moments proportioned in
perfect homogeny squeezed through a spluttering
sandglass fixed in a bristling fit of Lamaze)
to inscribe this callused trouvaille she’d
stripped from the bones of a musty Redbook
left by a ticklish boobook mystic
threading its feathers through floundering spandex; why
you’d muttered of spiderwebs and small eft-like things,
of course, and debrided the storm-shod sea to a
little mess of whelks and stumbling sanderlings,
dubbed your husband Bill or Volition or something,
swaddled the sun in a splintering footprint,
said you’d abandoned the beach to the gulls and fleas,
and the tide dare suckle your knees now,
sulkily seeking a simple salve for its raddling lesions
laced like a scabbing tartan—
                                      everything evermore marching
for your favor,
              alley cats laying their teeth on disgusting streets,
the cottonwoods hobbling bothersome pothers of pollen,
                                                           ablating their progenies,
             blue-footed chickens surrendering eggs and meat
    and whatever you need, yet what is it
you must stubbornly savor, why
weren’t you just jazzed to still be breathing,
beating your heart to a dicky alarm clock,
tempering shins and chins to a spotless steel,
              the winch of your Peloton reeling still,
and still, the stillborn dreams suspended,
clenched in a shunted drum of relish,
in dust disturbing the gut of a Dyson—

                         we’re a twisted bitch, now, aren’t we?
less than a gallic bulldog stricken with crippling bloat—!
as the Thames entwines with the Cuyahoga,
stoked by a feral film, by the fetid fumes
of a star expressing its restive pulse,
              pinned up in a lavishly tidied aside,
                                                      our star left
pressed as a anal sac incensed and
pinched by an overwrought mother of
pugs whose sons and grandsons swell, kvelled
for their grass-wrought rashes,
lavished with passion fruit
                                                         smugly
groped to a pus-colored cold cream; she,
who slavers her listless lawn, like shriveling lime pulp
(like chapped lips of that wicked witch’s clittoris),
some six stints a night in the shadows
of Sugarloaf Mountain, left of Socorro,
south of the crackling Acheron; quivers

of peaky tears resolved to salve what
creak in what’s left of the bed of the
Rio Grande, like crepitant snakeskin
claiming its stake amongst rambling canyons,
broken crayons and crowns bid
pale as young Charon’s buskins
buttered in mud and blood and a dog knows
what of eternity’s worming
                                                   struts—
(you told me the house was shaking)

an intrusion of roaches shucked
and stuck above sticky scabbards dissembling
                                                             fan blades;
griseous skin upended, penned
in the plastic paunch of a nauseous dyson,
plump as the dust that buckles a puckering rug
to remind us of sumptuous boils and spoils in-
                        terred in the flanks of a cankered arroyo;
and silverfish squeakily scouring snickering frames
to glare as a silvered incisor, a slithering slug
kept safe in a shapeless smile, replacing
what oddly discolored in death, reminding
the moon that it never was full enough,
nary so thin you’d demur to refuse
                               to see it,
                               to feel it,
suppling—                 there.
                                  
                                     and, needless to say,
I’ve miscarried
                             your wicked addendum,

some blue Narcissus gargling saccharine curds
of impervious throatsong, rooked from a broken bird
arraigned by a pallet of green-cheeked Johns and Georges
wove in an ornery gorse of gilded newsprint, suckling
succorous marrow from barnacled sacra,
settling stakes amongst brawling gods
                   or coldly muttering mothers, and
shaking a hollowed and wallowing limb gone limp,
                   to lavish this half-chewn grave
                   endeared with damp daffodils
                   woven of modal and grosgrain,

ouroboros unbroken, enthralled with the rambling
Ganges licked to invidious flame—

you’ll speak that psalm
you’ve stole from the gusseted
sugarfoot woodchuck shaman,
bright as a betta fish ripping its own reflections
rawed along walls of this motley, fish-eyed urn,
which betta fish churn and spurn borne baying
like listless querns fatigued from yet trying
to squeeze from a cabochon succulent nutmeat pink
                          as some prised blue-ribbon pudendum;
madlibbing elegies hinged on a whingeing pulse
once burnished the amber of bittersweet, exultations
on the lam, some dubious eulogy uttering only once
of a moment one simply couldn’t just stand to
                                                          simply try to
                                                                                   stand
                                                                          for
               what?! It’s a letter to,
              what does it matter?!

Amid daffodil’d dewdrops darning a dammed-up crick,
I note your dismissive reflection.

Arrested, mortified, boisterous, gilt,

                                            God speed you, Mame,

grand plinth of the splintering kilter,
       bane of what idling gods could scarcely tame

with a careless tare
      perversely afflicting a feather.

      Night-night, now. Sweetest dreams. I’ll see you

later.


Mame’s rebuttal
(assaying just
what she’d sworn
was a surefire cure
for the scurvy)

Oranges, once so rare
to the Dobe Ju /hoan,
they became their word
for the female
                          orgasm—

and here, I
force them
down a cavorting
                    throat
in an effort to
leave the tongue
                              untouched—

for the vitamins, mind you.