Oblique Yen In Loam Path of Languor

            — for Elisabeth Workman, after her “Occult Clouds Rhyme In My Galactic Mom”

(This is an older poem — full disclosure — but wanted to post *something* bc no time to write past few days)

1

A raptor in descent
sugars the sea change to poison

to stay alive in ardent gardens
pomped with bones and teeth.

2

Mood pages in a breeze moult
always in roam-time.

The bowl before the sensorium,
the glyphs before the lore

of mutant maws declared American:
the lost is cause; I in my bog.

3

But here with hands and no utensils,
the caveat is rats disguised as dogs.

In the beginning there was fennel, and laments,
a song about psychopomps.

In the hedge of what to wear tonight
is quelled Solange and Baubo.

4

I caul
I tangle

And when I angle
and you don’t answer

I slide my sequins down
ahead of sun.

5

In this egg skin of portals,
any idea will do:

benefits of blue glass,
fungi in the chant,

a science finale in which the living lie
dying of sun-bleached stones.

6

Nothing personal, but
my Orc is confused by your torpors

across the shifting dunes.
Let this incomprehensible flux eviscerate

earthly magnetism and chance,
the green bed of mid-morning.

7

You have no body yet are ready to secrete
the edge of banished feeling.

There is no elephant spraying
your lady silently with soap.

There is no freedom,
courtesy of mastodons in the grotto.

8

Again, don’t worry, everything’s under control.
In the short film I showed,

the metaxu of John the Baptist
was too profile, too cameo.

But the swan queen was my mother,
whom I thought I knew.

9

In the city of the sun,
glittering void vestments

wrote poems releasing the zoo
from resistance.

The limits of this freak way
formed figurines, strange nourishments.

10

A new sense in the form of glass
truffles distillations of my paralysis.

Forever young,
my already hemorrhaging heart

flings eyeballs
toward your cliff face.

11

For sport, I doubted your tannenbaum,
but gathered your spalled appellations

and released them to the sea.
Ugly feelings sometimes

go all the way back
to the first extension cord.

12

I am in a sense bionic
when I tap a minor succulence

to spray its ovum skyward;
its fishy viscera

is the sovereign flower
of a quivering metallic disk.

13

The delivery girl for Tony’s Pizza
put her finger in my thong.

So come musk, come ox,
come eon of sylvan aerie,

abject sentience by a vexed river,
more favorable lustrations.