(VII)
The Green is a comfort to some
other evil woman. For,
everpresent, some other
woman glows the green,
grows in green and
offers comfort to many indeed.
Murder, too, is a comfort to her in
her infernal age.
She retires again, a hissing miasma
from some terrifying upskirt.
The Evil moves too inside The Man.
He read Rimbaud. But don't they all?
(VIII)
In birdsong or in drinking,
batters women in his hotel suite.
He chews candy, magic ju-jubes,
He chews off her tongue and his mouth
fills with blood
the taste of plagiarized expression.
But blood in his mouth aside, the real she
was from another lifetime.
She left like a little bird
through a broken window,
she flew out with his world between her
claws pressed against her sex
and they all flutter below,
clattering like cameras and
sending light to chase her
and spread her feathers on the lawn.
spread her wings in suburban sky,
send her pulsing pretty
through the roots below the grass.
Spraying her like pesticides.
Later they lick their fingers.
Later they kiss her gently
sleeping wound.
They braid her hair into theirs
until they form a faery ring
around her dampened purses,
popping answers like candied
birth control pills.
They scrape their
questions from membrane of
the great glass eye. The
screen crawls with hungry meaning.
(IX)
(I pause here for more rational thought.
What good is literature but lines to spout
at parties? Stick instead to lines formed
in quiet after the party. Stick instead
to the dental fixtures in the mouths of
all the Big Questions. Stick instead to
the affections of some divinely possessed
flesh.)
"It must be bad comedy,"
the withered old things plead
as youth recoils in their eyes.
Their age is a star that
stretches up
in evening as a great tower,
dark purple
veined grey, a glassy thing
of bulging turrets
that stammers in response.
Bethought by hooking
bait claims "cogito ergo sum"
turning in the shallow pool
to reveal...
strobe of thinking missing instants
(and none understand
the shine of their skin)
so he must have been mad.
Or, at the very least,
he must be terminally
out of date,
terminally
out of time,
So we could outrun him.
She could outrun him. There was
more to her than was left running
salty from his eyes as she left.
His eyes emit wet black spines.
Boys should never wear mascara.
Boys should know enough to run
away scared when she spreads
her wings upon the doorstep.
It reeks of the familiar; these
musty electronic tunnels devoid
of fresh drops from breast,
small pearls to sweeten breath;
another hit vein goes down
with some acquired immunity.
(X)
There is no integration here;
instead there is nonsense
in fragrant abundance.
so wisdom stoned by the rackscreams twisted sentence
with fallen form on which to capture and record.
None of them own me owe me a tall ominous promise
after all this sloughing off, the old drawn hands,
drying, greying, clenching closed
as more static rages from the white air to swallow
screams, polish the rack and foil that which tries
in vain to extract you.
Listen to the violence, the splattered air
that hangs outside. There will never be another
bouquet with arrangements like these.
(XI)
Here, a half-eaten lizard who will
never understand beautiful women.
This three letter word,
a curious form of lubrication. Crouching on my back,
a dead cat, like invisible, an absence of ink,
effortless, leaving impotency in favour of rust.
It imitates other intoxicants; it creates their symptoms;
walks in their place in the bloodstream.
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