The Lady amongst the sweet potatoes, tiny
Coal blue ashen little black flowers dust
The ground.
The ochre feet settle softly
Burning bugs in the nettles bright
Breasts hang low, reaching
Big bellied babes’ gaping grins
Barely reaching.
Amid the still blue jungle nights
As haunting yawps of muscled cries
Resound through empty pastures pillaged
Hornbills splitting heads on the sordid riverbanks.
Slovenly obsequious to new-age neon
And flat and flawless flesh
Stir me from my drunken stupor. Please
Lead me by the hand by bloated bodies
Bobbing slowly with ebb and flow
In the river, silted closed with
Corporate invocation and
Savage butchery of arms and heads and shoulders
Gold teeth and ivory shins.
Pituitaries ripped informally from plots,
Shoved wayward testes into mongrels in the night
Make a man out a beast;
A beast out a man.
The first dilemma:
Makes me wretch to see the wretched so
But pay a pithy penny to
Fill my cup with grace
And revel in Roman pleasure gardens
Drink up the sky, Caligula
Turn not up your nose.
Let the silver spoon in the backway -
Hide my desire for screen-flash of stench and decay; I
Absorb through my skin everything I ever need to know,
Secret in the dark. Smoke your cigarette.
Take me behind a bush and slit my throat
With benediction, rosewater and myrrh
Accompanied by numeric cello swells,
But Signal your intentions first.
Listening to:
Come, Gone by Sonny Rollins, Way Out West
