from THE SCND VRSE of MY LFE

That according to The Book of Kings
the owls are not what they seem
though one might still come to judge
by playing the harbinger and (yes) entering

Heaven by ‘fire.’ It was ‘by fire’
that Elijah (אֵלִיָּהוּ) defended
the train and rite to worship
יהוה, my own Hebrew God

over that of the Canaanite Baal,
that opprobrious בַּעַל זְבוּב
Baʿal Zəvûv, or Beelzebub
for which one now swats

another juicy fly off the pink-
to-orange spotted wall-
flowers. Meanwhile, I scan
through some cemetery trees,

through the very blunt-
smoke of purple haze
and plain-old ugliness
and greed, searching

for ‘the long broken arm
of human law’ before, like
Radiohead’s Kid A,
climbing up some walls;

that the Hebrew for this word,
‘go limping’ or ‘waver’, is one
and the same as that used for
‘danced’ in 1 Kings 18, verse 26,

where the prophets of Baal
frantically dance like an Ox
before being slaughtered
upon a few teepee columns

of Olive wood, which these Canaanites
have stacked for (what else) their alter.
Atop Mt. Caramel where, in fact,
Elijah will accordingly ‘Cry aloud!’

and mock what proves to be
if not ‘Surely false,’ something
of a buzzkill; as, to be sure,
these 450 prophets of Beetlejuice

respond by cutting themselves as mean
of adding their own blood to the sacrifice.

*

the ashes
I ate
for breakfast.
like a rain-
bow trout
as she hic-
cups up

stream–that they went down
so swimmingly;
yeah, so swimmingly,
as this bright red-
to-yellow canary
pipes down
an Oriel-
sized breakfast

worm for his morning’s value meal,
a meal that perhaps even I would
barrel down the hatch with a few
sunny drops of (yeah) some juice.

         *

Meanwhile, the ashes I ate, mixed with some orange pulp take on
the very flesh tones and dawning riptide temperatures for a sky
that, like a to-be-finished quilt, weaves itself through the morning
tides of crimson before continuing to bruise for autumn’s burst
of eggplant to aubergine shades of rhythm, which matches the color

of this kite–as now the blanched canvas threads itself in a cross-
stitch pattern against a Klee-violet patch of tall nimbus cld*s, c*
lds for which the Piper greets his shepherd’s pipe at the green-
to-golden gateway of meteor-gray glass as it comes down to
simply negating the dawn; notwithstanding, the Pink Floyd Flurry

of ashes that, for breakfast, I now still might swallow for a bourbon-
soaked grin as I cry and grimace in some cosmonaut’s kind of pain.

*

Old photographs of what beneath the full moon could be a wristwatch UFO
swaying according to Big Ben’s tock and chime. Beneath a pink nimbus brigade of foster clouds that looked like a home beginning to burn as it folded under a stage curtain of some simple smoke