(synastry reeling red
as a tetchy obsession with tangling thread
and absolving knots beyond ponderous gullets
of aglets pecking at mother-tucked husks of a seedbed)—

Theogaloam,
            what sniggering lampposts speak and
            concede at dusk to the corkscrewing
            fireflies spryly trepanning a blistered chin,
            the simpering possum’s shin now
            aroar with serratia marcescens mistaken
            for tartly laboring legions of leprous
            ketchup—

theogaloam,
            sigh of a craftsman’s malcontent
            when prying the fly from the marmalade,
            bass strings whingeing angels crimp around
            moments of woefully treacly simplicity,
            cat’s allowing mere moths to live,
            and the prickling din of a city
            come Christmas Eve, the trash cans
            toppled, reprieved, and sweetly
            repurposed to furnish a log flume—

theoga loam,
              more than a quickening sense of a sticky agenda,
              crickets colluding with cryptic stars
              arranged to rekindle in clamorous tar,
              in macadam bid ambered and amply scalped,
              those prowling hordes of bloodhounds quietly
              cleaving with wheezing prows the calamitous
              static once sieved to seem maybe like
                                           this and that,
              the salt of the Caspian, clabbering milk fat
              woven to more than a souring cloud, a
              vision enshrouding some finicky cryptid
              gilt, prophetic, imperiled—

the oga loam,
               smiling miles from hell or home
               interred in a tarrying locust,
               wisteria’d thorns the dully stuttering
               gar teeth clung along teats of a marigold
               lamppost gargling ardent nymphs
               and summoning, but as mere recompense,
               these twisted soles of their sister stars
               to smudge among buttery dust and alacritous
               shadows those harrowing hymns of the famished
               dermestids licking the scythe aglint and
               steering but peaking weeds to bay
               as coyotes rasp at infecund escarpments,
               as shadows thrash and thrum at collapsing
               scowls, and, crassly as sycamores howl,
  
demurring to turn in their half-dead dances
Brahmin and dryads derived from a simpering
starling’s psalm,
                              or the owl’s epistles as
shrill and fulfilling as stammering lampposts
yawn—
               and long to dissemble a white-knuckled sunset.