One shot. In the past. A while ago. If correct. My life
Was one long bash where all hearts stretched wide
Into dry, leather maps as telling as the palm,
Where all waters west kept running as wine into the night

I pissed on Beauty’s lap and so found her annoying.
Silent, I smiled again into sunrise
And from the mousetrap broke my fast in an empty,
non-fungible absorption.

I have never pledged to do anything:
Again. Most astrally [sic] debauched.
A hyena that becomes a scorpion.
In spirit, I yawed myself in the mien

Of crime, through the pure tedium of existence.
With dead lips, I played the Devil’s trombone,
The Angel’s trumpet. In and out
Of that supreme (surréaliste) horror.

Ach!–have I said too much? Between us
Hell shines from its prison like the sun
Through prophets’ pierced eyes
Which our executioners keep frozen

In one cathedral’s stained glass window.
But precious...

A number of heads (identical) prying out window (broken), observing
passage (ponderous) of elephant (inflatable).

Now to my point (bobbing) about the polka (dot, dot, dot) and the resurrected mime (name: Bubbles) being open for business.

Now to my point (capsized) about my third eye (anchored) where your toothpick’s still lodged.

Now to my point (not formulated) about the flowers falling (down-the-mouth).

Now to my point (brobdingnag) about how long can I let my thoughts smoulder in this place?

Cyclops; Arges, Steropes, Brontes? You won’t encounter them.

Mr. Bones took the cardinal from the queen’s tongue. Proceeded to chew on her necklace. Mr. Bones took the bullfrog from the pope’s mouth.
Proceeded to retch on the carpet. Mr. Bones took the cabinet (baronial)
from the president’s chest. Proceeded to march through a great flood.

Why? There is no why.

More extremely...

Raised from the smutty toaster of death … .
At Five A.M., already drinking stale beer
With Lucifer’s sunny switchblade at your throat
While the neighbor with the bad cough
Jumps rope at the humming edge of the world … .

I should have tipped my hat to him but distracted
I was by the smell of freshly-cut roses
Cackling up my spine
As a hearse (black cape, blindfolded eyes) idled past
Heading for the famous train I saw in a painting once … .

‘It’s just a dirty fib,’ I’ll spiel to them
As they tuck their gods
Into cradles, tie their houses to kites
And gently piss against the wind

Praying the wind might whisper some-
Thing like a last supper back to them.

If anyone moving forward asks what I look for in the work of my peers and particularly myself, that of the past and what still is to come, I leave no agreeable recipe; no burdensome, by-the-book formula. Quite the opposite, I follow Wittgenstein’s wily (if not numinous) approach to the dissemination of Philosophical thought, providing those of you there in the future with the following aphorism, which will suffice for my obiter dicta:

“A sound poem should have the impact of a consonant (turned-up, perhaps, at times, even clangorous) punch to the ear.” EH

1

What might have sounded
Like a fair-ground frog
As it flailed (ribbit after ribbit)
To top out Eric Houdini’s

10-gallon hat was in fact
The mind clearing
A leopard-slug
From its throat

As memory bowled
Down a waxed passage
Of cherry-stained oak,

Aiming for the spare pin
Standing in
As exclamation mark.

Yeah. For the night
I couched
Beneath an elm

In the rambles of Central Park–

That while recounting my own soap opera
Of caws and croaks, after failing to veer.
To veer from what now plays for a Rick

& Morty episode.

2

It was the 1 Train’s ingress
I took for Super Mario’s
Green drainpipe
Of first awe then plain warp

After piping down a green wad
Of pineapple express spiked
With the thorns of (yeah)

Some angel dust.

3

And so like Dante without guidebook
I entered Hell’s bowels; it’s only in hind-
sight, after you’ve tipped over one too

Many cows, and having stirred...

The top-note of my burglar alarm
Tripped more than sprung
By the fat toe
Of some jaundiced scofflaw
Decked in the soiled garb
Of a post-modern buccaneer
As he topples with what sounds
Like a caterwaul over a gargoyle’s
Detached head. Yes, a gargoyle’s
Detached head which, decorating
My front lawn, almost stands in place
Of the flamingo that to sink
Some drowned point home
Or further fuel my anger,
My ex-wife paid some flame by blowjob
To set match to a pile of my best-loved books.
And that I should be painted ‘crook,’
Blacker than the rook-bush and scruff
of this Captain Blackbeard.
Yes, this Captain Blackbeard
Whose head I’m stepping off
My own deck now to royally disembark.

                                    for Franz Kafka

Some day I’ll explain. But now this far into the cavity,
I’m left chewing rocks in the broken bathtub
Some angel of death abandoned on the sidewalk.
Not for the last time is it growing (miraculous)
Out of hand–the mind spinning like a rehabbed top
Between the camel’s humps
While the giraffe runs over a stop sign. The luck
That I should be the only bystander spitting crow
At the scream of the crime
Sounds about right. Like a rabid punch.
In the meantime, I’m the hunched-over word
Inside the dictionary that no one will look up.
And then what precisely is it? To sit and write poetry
As the yard floats away in slurry fragments
Where you are left lugubrious, deflated, smoking
In the wrinkles of this shade. Whatever else
Is happening somewhere off, galloping along
On a pink Triceratops isn’t likely but quite possible.
That’s the...

It’s in the country of the lime
that Judas (once again) plants
the coin with the face of Μῶμος
far ahead of this date where the sky’s

a smooth-tinted sheet of glass,
where so much from the fun house
now spins out of its straw, falling–
all these charred scarecrows

and burned-up clowns, freakish
and tearfully dwn the mud-pit
to endlessly drain, crying of 49

that self-same lot.
While you might have already donne
the math, the plot thickens

for (yeah) this fatal clot.

Surely Noah squibbed out the flr pln
not only for the Titanic but the ivy-
glass tower that like Adam was pining
for a twin to spring from his very own rib.

It’s that snake of copper that now fears
the very rapture which will shuck and quarter
his very own skin … Meanwhile, that ah-
ha moment that like Tesla’s bottle of lightning

Smith’s still trying to capture as if the jar might scan
as in fax the fuck into Neo’s pink patch of turf.
Too bad, too bad; Smith finds himself beamed

into the raunch stomach of this eagle in which
the owl doesn’t grant favor and so as with the mouse
Smith’s lizard-green bones are to be picked into dust.

The ‘quill-prong’ of ‘a scorpion,’ a Caligula term.
Caligula himself meaning “baby-soldier’s boot.”

My own boot camp being off the map might confirm
next to nothing while my left eye’s birthmark classifies

my tallest calling as one of those rare pond-walking poets.
One of those rare pond-walking poets who you’ve all sunk

in this yellow house of Carolina blue in order that you might
ride in some Pumpkin to (yeah) Cinderella’s Ball, that is sell-out

if not abscond from something akin to Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting
of the Snark. The word ‘hill-Billie rat’ was first used by ‘I don’t give

a flying fuck’ in a sealed, air-tight letter; a sealed, air-tight letter con-
cerning the self-same lost boy landing with a stone-cold thump upon

steam-punk water, landing like a puck that on February 22, 1980 was
“The Miracle on Ice.”