Tuesday, January 17, 2012

INTERLUDE (Under Construction)


LESSER MAMMALS
Still quilled and beaked you lay leathery eggs
in mud burrows and sweat thick milk from your pores to
nurture your young. Your legs are too short to run but
that's okay, nothing is looking to eat you
anyway.


THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS
Let's sit around and put cigarettes out in each others' eyes.
I'll get fat, but you don't have to.
We can say, these cups are for vodka and those over there, coffee.
We neither of us can make omelets, so.

Wake up some mornings in a fist fight;
fists tight down under
down pillows
need to explode somewhere. 
Bruises. Apples cut into quarters with a big dumb knife.
Boxes of rags worn in fits of manic disinfection, of whimsy;
boxes of clementines,  People magazines, of whirring metal toys,
unusually shaped root vegetables,
empty jewel cases
chalk.
Wood carvings hung off-center, leaning low on one side.
Sloppy black and white glamor prints stuck under dead flowers.
A whole hist'ry
a fake ancestry on the walls.
Horns and feathers, blood (or soup? probably soup) on the floor,
and tissues and hair and fingernail slivers, sometimes gobbed all at once
on the bottoms of your socks.
A gleaming bronze spitoon.
We can say, these bowls are for cereal and those over there, wine.

I'll wash you.

We'll wish ourselves full with tumors and stones, left lonely in place to sink into the ocean
on nights when the addictions churn or the serotonin drops or the money's low or
you know
whatever
(we'll visit the beach, I mean).

Then one day,
wet up to our forearms
chilled by the mountain lake where we drowned the children,
it will hit me:
You probably get this sort of thing all the time.