Sundress, Fortress
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SECOND GLANCE AT CORRAG
Pelt burdened by burrs. Out of the morass
he looked like a reconstructed grenade.
Corroded cloak pin of his cant-hook claws.
The bulrushes gave their windhead nods.
At his lope, spores back step and scatter.
And that spine scar where the key enters and winds.
The beehive of his eyes send droids to probe
the switchgrass. So still, the windsocks
hung like daggered lungs. His Bible is a flip-book
of practical anatomy. His sightline, a river
you can’t talk across. An inmate running his tin cup
along the bars is the muscle-headed bruise racing
inside his ribs like a motorbike in a cage ball.
From southern cape to southern cape
his lungs are a harrow’s width apart.
His cochlea is a spoon-dug tunnel beneath
the pet cemetery. His saphenous nerve a boy
with a bouquet of fresh horses. His irises are owls
and owls are cached hunks of bonfire soot.
His hunger strike does not include giving up fellatio.
Veins are a Gorgon’s black-adder bouffant.
Capillaries are winter maples scrubbing the mist.
Blood cells are dust taxied down a flashlight’s path.
His mouth is my mother crying in the carwash.
Dew worm hunters hatch kerosene lamps
on the Gospel choir of his brain
while he comes crawling in his Sunday best,
as though his spine were a bell rope
at midnight and the village was vacant
and his father had gone to town
with his inheritance – an Alsatian
that was a dowry for the distance
he’d cross day after dawn after dusk.
MYSELF THE ONLY KANGAROO
AMONG THE BEAUTY
– Emily Dickinson
In the procession, wind farmers flutter
their hankies and the cellist’s hand crabs
along the neck and the quayside flautist
foregoes grace notes to watch the rowboat boys
come home and turn to stone and the tulip-fisted killer
knocks on the door of your eyesore and bows too quickly,
as though his necktie caught the lathe and bright enough,
he stands before the bulb and each day you get a piece
of that hostage in the mail and it was the time to kill
that he used unwisely, and after the shot animals stopped
and stillness groomed the grasslands and you thought
the phone on television was your own and your daughter
is against the pinwheel but he is so damn poor at the knife throw
and the slate steps break your fall into a million and change
and a megalith in a forgotten metropolis has a toy flame
in the frame of a paneless bay window
and the automobiles in the wrecking yard are autopsied
for trace amounts of conversation and he tells you
love is the Herculean task of being a janitor
in an alabaster abattoir and your lust is the carnivore
who’s been at the back door five years
for the butterflies of those hinges to fly open
for you to wring the mop into his
baby bird mouth.
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