Tigers in a sea of shadows
Stalk my aging pride,
Pull me on an ageless tide,
In a twisted town square
Thick with human bustle.
I ride in circles, squares, games
That shuffle lives like a Tarot deck,
But the dark-striped cats never attack.
I ride from the department store
Where I’d spied my grandfather
Bopping to the beat of Michael Jackson,
Still as he was, in a red shirt,
Sitting in his wheelchair, as
Tigers in the town square prowl
Our sick bustle, attacking only fear
As our animal needs vanish.
Tragedy’s anniversary receives
En masse the gift of life;
I stand at the kitchen window
And pray the cabal be stripped of its knives.
My own cat flees –
A kiss must appear grotesque
To those without lips.
Apollinaire’s words bled onto the page,
His demure face unready for war,
His hands read by drunken eyes.
Chief liar plugged in bloated dead-rat dream,
stained meme of bribery home –
The sun never stops a gleam:
No stump speeches, no shortfalls
Or pittances couched and handily emptied.
Christs of free consciousness
Traipse lakeshadow artery
caressing absolution, their
Hermetic pools poised across archaic shelf
obliterators of human failure,
idleness’ sigils razed I instead breathe
Bounty, leisure, abundance
As the pogrom’s fancy dies.
Bones of browning skin rattle
With high parking lot comers, claiming
Their piney estate in mute pleasure.
Hums the bird-clock galvanic –
Would it carry place-name truth of you,
Where life truly stays?
Words held in rare head
Where singular mouth flurried
Need no slumbering list to test the air.
Dada of space wonder,
Consul of a wanton game,
Memory’s circus ballroom’s gutted,
But the blood never forgets.
Someone’s decade knelt down;
Another one’s tumbled.
Vicar of cool cause,
Leaded footprint of game show gods,
Empires of wood-paneled rises,
Summer lawns fed with shrewd claw-bits;
Turtlenecked desire once wore you where
The snug epoch was parsed.
No delay of your fished northern veins –
Years piled on years long have held out
That green car for you.
Acquisition’s tiled halls may re-seed
broken hives of commerce, but
Still-knot a forgiven cowboy who acts out
The starry dream for applause:
Poise of wondrous-bosomed airs
Dawn with peace in bombarded lairs
(But the himba–mädchens go on singing)
When the addled race rabbits the spoils
Hymns cover the forgotten hills –
Colors just beginning to dazzle
Fallen from ambitious wound,
Led into bourgeois galleries
Glutted by status garages and minds –
Usurpers, we, have conquered the land.
Our actor-hero-TV leaders say so,
Time’s holo-cognate dubs silly children slaves.
Nowhere to run from what the moon craves.
Reach with epochal stabs to gain higher signals,
As is spread the general breach like pâté
while criminals police you. Read:
- List of Depression-era actor salaries
- List of NY train disasters
- List of most dangerous animals
- Richest bankers in heaven
- Top 10 brightest galaxies
Copies of haloes handed out as Hollywood awards;
Tintype of “most evil woman” shows her
Blued with smiling devilry, her “red child” running.
Dolorous spin of earth has Okinawa flutes lamenting
& New York summers already packing up the chairs,
When hardly a Tuesday can woo us,
No love in the afternoon for the poor American.
Hoggish schemers wear fiscal futures like
Girdles or gridiron teeth.
Museum of the A-bomb recreates the blasts
Of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Unholy Trinity
Every Tuesday and Thursday at 1 and 3pm;
America entire attics of fluff & diversion,
time to kill the wolves in your henhouse.
Time to sober God up & fertilize the
Hidden gardens, gold patches,
trade the Nazi in for vector of truisms.
Whence bulleted real heroes,
Bombast of destiny camera’d, come we
Buffalo & obelisk.
Diner car gutted, Detroit industry graveyard,
Fake-tree towers upon skyline ridges
Felling you, now
Does this great gut cry out for hara-kiri?
Floors all clean, plates all stacked,
Now call for Superman, for God has been
Drowned in our blood – revive!
Vertigo muscle retracts you,
Strawmen in sackcloth preach
Till snowflake vacancies
Deride them with new dreams.
What I mean is stop thinking
& scent your inner fire.
Our blue Montmartre is far too serious,
Vagabonds maintenant carry derelict bones
Through Purgatory’s necropolis
Whilst trivia gilds temples for corporate oblation.
Cotillion eating feral canyon graphology,
Scrubbed by mafia banks,
You are red man’s hell.
You are expiry of the primal bid.
Your tiger escorts are here
To usher you to the seas of eternal shadow.
– September 11-12, 2014
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