Flickering shadows
bite and scratch and boil
in island stews to feed
the drug effect,
an army amassed
waist deep in a swamp
in a pact between witch doctor
and mad scientist
sealed with goat blood.
Their stuff is bad.
They use the spiny fish.
They make potions that
kill and keep alive.
Death is illusion
everyone wants most.
Wild world catharsis
produces sterile moons,
held by obedience
to the vainglorious core.
Marrow is formed blood.
Suet and lard
are bloods
under bloodless gray moon,
and the plants in its tide
intolerably musky.
When the feathered club
pounds the blowfish
to a poison paste,
when the gray moon
reproves the shallows
and what that might mean,
the gray turning fecund,
who can tell
the vegetable
from the mold?
POP GOES THE MOUNTWEAZEL
Speaking as someone
who has been in this bar
forever among upside-downers
and down-and-outers
taking in the hate cure,
the Celine solution,
my gaze can illumine
the infundibulum
of your soul, a panjandrum
of suggestio falsi
or suppressio veri:
Lie, or sit on your truth.
+
The wives
of David Niven
were, first, Primula
and, second, Hjördis.
Their names make him sound like
a downed man of myth, punished
by an angry god who turned
Primula into a flower bed and later
Hjördis into a fjord because Niven
once played an esquivalient, pop
bishop who foolishly called
the moon a balloon.
THE MONKEY’S RELIC
If you make processed meats
for a living, you don’t eat them.
You know what they contain.
If you write poems, you know
the routine of mis-execution,
of hearing too clearly
the interior’s elevation into canon
only to transcribe it with a paw.
If you continue to write poems,
you stop reading others’ poems
because you know they are wrong.
Beyond that, you can see
where the poets’ lives
have gone wrong, like the lives
of the saints,
ending in persecutions
and horrible deaths
so wrongful they inspire
the wrong works of followers
through the ages.
First of the mortifications
of the flesh, my wish upwells
to stick a pen in my blind spot
and write no wrong.