FORCEPS TWO-STEP
From the culture lying around
doing simple math, dances
a citizen DNA, whose limbs
carry one to each palm
a gold or silver apple. The Petri
and Pestle families proudly announced
the execution of their redundant,
half-hearted intentions, but then
the slapstick routine was aborted
when a sperm whale wrecked
an ostrich egg and made the mystery books:
Call it fish mail, female or if male.
The world’s antennae navigate the tips
of fingers, flares of eyes and ears,
a rose, and a tongue for muscles,
electric with pregnancy. Just bivouacked
outside city limitations of marriage,
coercion, and a pocket-sized god,
the victorious general stretches the tent
and begins the creation of her language.
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN
Our genetic traits climb their spiral staircases
into flesh: "Da! Nada, DNA!" "Ann and Dan,
the primate belle and gentleman, are now
entering the ball of banality."
The mansion broods among mountains
of apple cores that perfume the roads
parting them with heave and hoe
on the way to the cemetery.
Somewhere on the property a kidney-shaped pool
begins to hump in the sun,
and while the dancers of death vegetate,
the blossoms have minds of their own.
In the feet worn out by hunters, farmers, and engineers,
mutant organisms slave at love against the walls
of creams: step, step -- glide.
One, two, buckle my shoe.
Atrophy, disease, famine, and war pound
at the door all the while.
In the waiting room, our noses turn to powder,
the snake pants loyal, and wags its tail beside us.
All the cotton-picking doctors in the world
cannot stop Scarlet from coloring the Earth.
Among the stars sometimes eclipsed
by the refraction of light, our behavior
has its stories, its alibis --
"My mother made me do it."
We wonder at each other blue
until the plantation's background becomes us.
WHETHER OR KNOTS
Our response to the elements begins
with the history of concrete and carpenters
and ends with our imaginations
pondering over the periodic table.
The mud huts and lean-tos
having once sheltered against sun and rain,
now have become the archeological mounds
of the ants, the subjects of worms,
the mixology of land developers.
The contents of suburban cellars and city towers,
reacting to the nightmare of toxins
and the riveting chant of the day,
teeter at the edges of space and place,
poise themselves for new generation.
Fertilized within the air-conditioned fortresses,
the dreams of office workers, I-beam climbers
in their atriums, mingle philosophy
with CO, KBr, and Li.
THE NATURE OF THINGS NOW
Wilted upon the sides of heads,
the ears don't orchestrate
the hummingbirds and bees.
The trumpet-mouthed sap plucker
crashes through the fields of towering
empty barrels screeching
an unrecognizable common sense.
When two or more blaring blurred visions meet,
the fog that requires jackhammers
for movement adds to its decibel level.
The nerve endings run the happy hiker
into the bottom of a canyon, the flesh caresses
its callouses and drums away objects.
From the futile soil of the scarecrow
ploughing the sky, curled steel and flakes
of concrete sprout. The balding planet
arranges a bouquet of bone for a woman
long since slag piles in the evening.
Copyright 2004, by Rich Murphy
