—an aspiring blue upon martins’ backs
or esurient roots unbound in budding blazes,
slavering gleam of lightfast, lustrous steel
that a simonizing star distilled  

(on anemic wax’s phantom stroke  
 wanned theorists fear fresh children slash,  
 the eye-white smudge of a blunted crayon  
 across this palest page                                      
                                           to limn the corrupted jib  
 of a new-shorn sun  
 that singed the sky a suspicious cerulean,  
 chillingly alice blue, or the buttery hue of a chewn and chastised cuticle),  

albeit from frigidly far-off hoarforth thrust
from a soundly browbeaten mountain’s haze—  
what withe-tongued wench’s iris wrecked
and wrapped around blackening rapture’s heels;
wry hustling pulse of a mandrill’s rump,
wan glow of a swallowed and glaucous lump;
what cringing cherubic cheek cathects
this oenomel hue of a smoldering soul
and, annealed by the roiling smudge
of a spiraling martin’s back,
like a sapphire skipped across
greigely baying, sepulchral puddles
glib darkness claws, sopped soles redouble—  

Rebuttals of bibulous briars’ bark!
“Know blue is blue, no blues apart  
 from martins’ backs or the gripple crabs  
 gaunt azure breakers sadly surrender,  
 abash’d and bedraggled hearts  
 or the chilblained tinder twisted in glistening veins,
 the sputtering horseshoe’s blood exposed,
 or blood that a swollen nose, some rusted jaw
 shrill-lachrymose measures seized,
 suspends in the blithering burden’s breath;
 no air arresting, eddying pinions of
 house martins                        
                              strident shrikes                                                  
                                                             must bloodlet—”  

(blue that hydrangeas dredged with acerbic soils should blush with;
 blue of the lead-eaten gums of a crazing painter cracked across chasms of canvas;
 blue as the succulent berries bursting sweet and springly green as sage scrub;
 blue as the indigo’d tabard tossed ‘cross caskets cradling spoondrift sloughed
 from hessians born upon rank and piss-tinged soil, seduced by Samson’s sirens,
 sloppily folded in oily pigments, scrubbed across sere and sunburnt skies;
 glib blue of a shadow smeared across cross-eyed macadam,
 that moon-licked tear uncurled around stiles of quietly quavering toes;
 burnt blue of a man o’ war split against blistering, sea-tickled shins
 or the blue of ballooning feasts for a sunfish;
 blue of the stridulous cellist’s slanting song
 that soothes the sea-bound schooner’s
 slinkily whirligig, sunken struts;
 frail blue of the thoughtless stripling’s nuts,
 fey blue of the false and mismanaged blood;
 old blue of belaboring burdens bravely balked,
 of an envermeiled face’s scrunching threads
 untethered from cramping scales and mudras,
 no more assailed nor burdened by bludgeoning pulse or ablating breath,
 bent blue as the shroud on a tragopan’s breast
 that slackens and sprawls like a beckoning crank bait;
 blue as a spy ring stymied by—