“  

What ligatures lost among mangled moorings?
This smoldering molt of a motionless poet
too loathe to be bothered by beautiful beckons
in lieu of the grumbling auger glanced
‘long slavering trances, trenches, and salt flats.  

Our Abecedarian’s abacus snapped across crooked knees,
damp haze of a cherry-eyed dream uncrumpling,
garbled and gnawed along nervous creases
smeared and jeered by a gibbet uncoiled
from Eiseley’s wasp-swoln oak endeared with
graven crests shone pale as yet pin-pricked planets
poised and planted about an indelible bark  

(shrill wincing whistles some sloppily wine-sapped sister
(or so among daughters’ dearest darlings dubbed)
should sharply skip across crackling streets,
round sullen soles and stridently summoned scowls
of sluggishly smoothing shards she’d
snapped from a broken bequest,
this rose-strewn wreath
of a hand-painted plate
percussed, greige edges rawed, pale crazing crusts
that meticulous mothers might patiently piece
and congeal with the dribbling juice of fastidious fingers
flayed for the sake of a keepsake),  

gnarly, darkened, glorious, porcelain bark
that quilt-kempt prongs of abrasive bucks
must break and braid in impervious patterns,
fey and laic cryptids cut amid shifting skin,
run rampant, dormant, salient, sejant,
reared upon pealing plates like thunderous thumb prints
seared against glaring glims,
like cataracts casually crafted coyly as woodgrain, hardly
as pulses prick—  

smudged irises dyed a familiar umber,
inky umbrages strangling slowly snaking stocks
and borderless branches, breakneck distaff
darned in derisively drooping shades
that a grandmother’d bade among silvery bangs
and the bruise-bound blood of an unctuous compact
oozed from shrewdly buckling fingers
(bacon’s bubbling molt’d annealed once more),
left ever thus twisting a tress preserved
with a tress unnerved
to wriggle and gasp
as a finger trap
triggered—  

What shadily earth-shorn arches, slender soles
reflecting a radius wound amid azure
and brambling veins engorged
by blended blood, averring that
red and blue, once blended,
bleed to red and blue  

(this obsessively passing buck,
the empurpled contusions of
flesh confused amid ravishing
fusion, surnames struck from
tumbling tongues that flip and
fillip in frothing dirges
catty, catadromous, disaffected,
cramped, cathected, disabused,
eclectic, bored, unbunged, then emptied,
pulseless husk of a sun-smothered beetroot)— 

Say
                                           “Vinegaroon of an Onion Kid” beat                                    
                                            about jangling chains of congested serifs,                                                                                              embossing a balsa hilt of the yellow sword                                                                                          he’d stripped from the hip of a Chippendale;  

                                            wan tumi wove of pilfered bone
                                            Cistercians’ rebellious children take
                                            to raking the nacreous sinew slick
                                            from thatch-frail stalks of the story-staved wolfsbane.  

Recall the Hyrcanian cat
once crouched and rasped
beneath bilious Hamlet’s tongue
that plunged from a stillborn mere of steel
(some sickly silvered limb
of dismembered waters
dammed with a monogrammed hanky),
licked at the thickened, sepulchral salve
of a broken crown,
of a blunted crest,
of the rubbery crust
of a honeydew plundered,
            bloated with frailly paling pips,
            the precocious hoards that knock kneed kings and princes
            pit upon sweat-shorn sheets of encircling grout
            and the tallow-softened spouts
            some slaves installed, gruff hordes
of puckering eunuchs prune and hourly polish,
            hung around harrowing harems,
            draped against creeping napes of the niggling balustrades
            tress-lithe iron femurs stent,
            ‘tween dusted shins of the muttering servants
            sealed with a sallowing pigment rank,
            coarse ink of a cuttlefish,
            gilt as careening eves
of clumsing, cloyed, wan-ocherous pollen,
            sneezing seas but ragweed jerks around
            jaggedly rankling breezes,
            boorish, boring, bluntly belaboring breaths—  

See the rough rubbings of rusted chassis;
mold among dust but threadbare breathing teases
easily, sloughed from a crusted mold
no neurotically nauseous godling dares
to retire to shadowy attics’ shunts;
this tiger’s kingly scowl that snakes
among Mandarins’ surnames, prowling proudly,
pinned upon pitiless plights of alighting spirits,
tales of a forebear’s glories fanned
or clipped in a prickling, rimed, and cloud-dinged clasp,
splayed feelers raised with rippling ages,
reared on a lurid, illustrious aegis,
propped upon itchily quivering palms,
ensnared in a chafing and sun-stained mantle
flesh-firm, lush, and empurpling maypole
wound and bound in strips of repurposed
naugahyde cribbed from a blacklisted fire sale.  

Say
                                    “Vinegaroon of  beet kid” bleared;
                                    what gar-toothed rasp of a raddling hermit,
                                    twirled ‘twixt noxious curds and a grandmother’s
                                    kisses sown among softening scowls;
                                   
                                    what files flake, what rasps remiss
                                    when twirled ‘twixt murmurous stars
                                    and an arching spine, glib memories
                                    etherized, supine,
                                                                        set to a shaky scalpel’s tang
                                    that chatters in deafening dirges,
                                    dithering shimmies, waltzes, trots,
                                    and the muttered merengue

                                    poised upon parents’ clogs—”