Poem—October, 2005
My friend Megan reminded me, this weekend
is peak weekend for fall colors—my friend
who like I, wishes very much she not die
solo, whether (despite the solace so
desired in life) along the smooth moving shoulder
of a river tucked away in southern Indiana, or
ugly, simplistic isolation (my mind moves
to: the self inflicted) in a sepia inked bed
where those present are required to be so,
as they check and wind their timepieces.
I want you to know
I saw that patch of sunflowers
huddled together in the unkempt grass
by the side of the overpass, over
in the factory district downtown—the ones
you mentioned on my couch one night in September
between brittle laughter holding conversation together,
and cradling glasses of Cabernet
and crying about intimate mistakes and what it takes
to make sense of why it seems unthinkable to let go
of someone saying good morning.
The man who lives under those concrete trestles
I’m certain, hoped you’d notice—not neglect
his bright-eyed discs which (due to a nastic response
to stimulus) rotate their yellow rays from east to
west each day. Their roots and all grounded
attachments revolving around a radiance which appears
to traverse our sailcloth, and whose arrival and position
(as opposed to the unceasing heliotropic hope we see
in these seeded faces) has only a temporary variation
from season to season.
Through the Knotted, Varicose Limbs
and what few faithful leaves remained
clinging to the trees in their idle fight
against abscission, I perceived the twilight
shift from season suiting granite to crimson
on the infamous night Clarity’s seductive cousin
(twice removed and aptly named)
Disparity came upon my black-ivied chateaux
—in town for the weekend, she claimed.
Although her lips, bloodied with Bordeaux,
left nothing more to be explained,
I felt that habitual tickle to press my lovely
guest with the question: Pray tell, what brings you down
to my neck of the copse? And while every
attempt was made to portray herself as a bashful, gown
stroking sprite—despite every expression
cradling the coy guise of spontaneity,
she was merely seeking a guy like me
to engage in a Sunday evening session
of premeditated indiscretion. In a fracture snap:
the dainty tease was in the sanctity of my spider wed bed
and I inside her (on my back naturally). Of course it
was only proper she detain her beloved
Great Dane by chaining him up in the fence out back
before we commenced—before slipping off those black
lace panties and slithering from her corset.
Miss D’s tongue went to work scrolling my
nape, but the kissing business didn’t last long
when she remembered why she had come
and began exploiting my loins. I:
clutching her timeline-tattooed spine as the hound
on the other side of the window went on licking the pane
and howling a litany with the insane
hope we’d do the same between growling sounds
of our own. Half conscious and lying in our silky
depressions, I wondered at the milky
figure floating through blackness with the grace
of a necrotic branch sailing to the bottom of my lake.
She paused in front of her full length reflection to take
in her naked frame stained in the flickering glow
of my gaslamp—lithe fingers crawling from her face
to linger, to admire the subtle hump of her angel skin
belly which was, impossibly, already starting to show.
The Butcher
We have become so fascinated
with the meal choices of megalomaniacs—fascists
who still speak and act with the love-sick subtlety
of a necrophiliac. Come hither my little coquette.
A certain criteria must be met in order
for armed guards to drop their guards. A disarmed
grin washes over our young soldier’s faces
as they peek in on Madame La Mortis. She smiles, slips
into something more comfortable,
like that little sarcophagus numb-er—exposing a lick
of her milky shoulder as she does so. For the sake of sanity
let’s not ask what she wants
for her last meal. She has been so busy lately
it seems nearly impossible
to sneak in these tiny cat naps. Down the hall:
past Solitary, she hears the black & white
television (the one with poor reception)
and the crackling voice of Oprah Winfrey,
who says she’s in the business of dream-making,
and our captive makes a note of it.
All this (you know) has less to do with the Butcher
and more to do with the meat.
You get that goose-flesh tickle
in every nook and cranny of your spinal cord
when you enter the dimly-lit coat check,
and all you discover are blood-spattered aprons,
hanging by their neck loops, ready to be fashioned
by the fabricator—
anxious for their next use.
Drogheda
Chain-shot—two cannon balls united by a short chain link,
designed to mangle a ship’s sails and rigging, or destroy
her masts and yards. Chain-shot is utilized as an anti-personnel
weapon when fired on land; inflicting damage to the enemy
by its sling-like rotation across the battlefield.
“He who could take Drogheda could take Hell.”
—Sir Arthur Aston, Royalist Soldier and Commander (1590-1649)
Under what brilliance remains
in the listless twilight of collective reflection,
one might subscribe to the following ax regarding our views:
the trick lies in how we utilize our objective perception.
You see, half the battle is breaking one another from the chains
of functional fixedness: a few rows of church pews
as kindling for instance,
so as to transmogrify the crucifix-spired
parish into an improvised furnace, whose sanctuary and nave
(once replete with priests and friars) are now a sort of pièce de résistance
choked with oak and bones. This is merely one in a wave
of examples in the sagacious opus of Cromwellian-inspired
tactics. Similarly, think
of the beacon of relief (while fleeting) faulty Chain-Shot (×—×)
brought to the people of Clonmel on 18th May 1650, no more
than 2 months after the fall of Killkenny; when the weak links
broke, creating a pseudo-shrapnel which surely bore
such vicious hope to the townsfolk facing Parliamentary onslaught
—hope that those tiny chains
would herald the preamble to their salvation.
Sir Arthur Aston was yet another illustration for those who beg
for one last glimpse in the midst of this grim improvisation.
Take it from a gentleman on the receiving end—a man who had his brains
bashed in with his own wooden leg.