Saturday, April 10, 2021

The Orange of the Poem

Passion is the Erigne of the tone,
     Works out the convalescence squirm
     To find the iridescence you've been given.
She breaks across the wooden realm of Joan
To masquerade as oneness in the furtive zone
     Of incandescent leisure worlds of men
     Who can't defend the messages they send,
The missives from a long-lost home ...

Miseries are for sunny days,
The whole thing is front-loaded,
Filled with disgust, ready to be shoveled
To the wishing pile, never mind the wash
Coming out in the intricate consanguinity
Of deep-seated pathos rung in the squeeze
Between laundromat proverbs and innocent suds.
The maker takes all diligent precautions
To ensure the figures are apt
For interpersonal disaster, transparent interplay.
The gnome of the world finds its own ordainment
In the calyx of long event sunsets,
The moaning cure of darkness and space,
The panoplies of infinite flux borne on a cheese 
Of excess, never mediate, ever-mudded,
Through any modalities necessary,
A route of discontent to fly through at distance
But the orb is a sly way to coagulate tears
In a crystalline salt shaking meter,
As an anchor on the boat, the beat moves
Too fast, the edges go frazzled in continuous churn,
In the pit of incommensurate salvage burn
Squawking for firecrack, the ends of a biscuit,
The age of Ptolemy covered in scars,
Rasputin too all done up in ivy,
Necessitous wormholes from volleys of spars
Under the cool blueing stars
As if, once more, the dollies will squeal
With delight, and make all dim shadings
Aright for the night of long knives and cold truth
And asterisk bluffing, the whole tub an onslaught
Of mud, sparking soap purple if only in air,
The tar is a river that's regnant there, commands
Elusive islands, sweeps them solemnly to the shore,
Blocking corporeal replies when the cloth comes 
To sanitize the sutures and lies, what wise ones 
Lay beside the boils of the tide in aerodynamic 
Slipstream ripped for complacent abjuring 
Of specificity, for it all inures to the sticky
Wet plastic strip that dangles for flies
And car keys, lobotomized trout.

You've been found out, circumscribed,
Ostracized, turned around inside;
What are the demure replies to the noise
That rise? It settles, the poem, wherever its words
Have fallen, what traipse of space mortals
Cannot enter, even with the slickest treads,
For there is only the steel of rails  
In the phosphorus heavens to glide by.
Memory is a funny strategy, Mnemosyne,
To take collapsing space like a hem or the weather
In, to make sense to the senseless, the dim,
The driven mad, the players on the butt-end
Of packs -- all that whispering is too much 
The sauce of waterfalls hinting, as the symbols 
Turn so perfectly into meaning
At an implausibly remote remove.

The plants are in rows, ID'ed and white-tagged.
The same sun descends on arboreal weeds,
Jungles where life is alive, and yearning
To let the Mother be, for there are many
Teachings out of her needle, that threads
The impossible to the seen.