Says up her nothing
good violence won’t dissolve
unless cripple one Sunday
and buried atop where sunshine
rolls about unfettered or rude
saying in circles women
never think if they cough nude.
Then more nothing bold and shy
in the way of what speaks
at people behind to mirrors
speaking old things wrong
when held up to the light—
sad never ended up right.

Looking up her skirt snowfall
comes quick and quicker still
short men ravish up like elves
crawling then walking
as they learn and nod,
preaching harlotry to the south
around here where people
copulate and pray in the same mouth.

When blackfaced I burn up
to drink sometimes and other times
windows look too large
at me undressing,
or dressing up hours before
the dark outside coughs
then steps on its smokes and peers
to me asking for its head
too long left on my house
moaning alcoholically for noon.

Violent winter’s marshal stomach
leaps ninetylegged and stout,
falls to drink and begins a song
whose earlobes are sat upon
in the bodies of hot sound
cuffing the outside dumb.
Soon will come gifts of filth
thrown like animals to largely animals
from everything above a ceiling
or a forehead or two together,
above the lurching necks of those gone.
Naked and serving dinner
to a thief in a little thigh
where grows like boys a tallish
hut on its diet of people
says he, he didn’t scuff my heirlooms,
the loons watching lakebottom silent
as they give themselves around footprints.

Young bastards share cigarettes
paled from the rarely-met daylight
& they step on their dumb passions
until noon strikes them
in their affairs and weeping
all of them on each other
as cannibals they depart what moral
cage best crept in taught
to those who it ought not be
and all cool down breathing as hard
as their fathers drunk on Friday night’s cards.

What lobotomy is this I found
on my hand growing towards me?
An impounded mute. Some wanting
child of pieces was lost
while someone not me became a waste
inside a human who can’t think,
or thinks of the wrongest beautiful
antiques of what was before pleasure.
That quarter of my brain fell out
somehow through another hole
too long left weeping and walking
sometimes and sitting I am drunk until I go away.

The revolver orgasmed
out some flowers picked by slaves
laboring over nuclear fallout.
The flowers blew into gunfire
wild and started to walk into cities
like Babylon handing themselves out.
The slaves rebelled and procreated
for generations a nigh sterile people
who never warred for sake of their genitals.

I sing of my citizens
proud and large in their many arms
all covering their dark mouths

from kisses and nibbles and gassing
them at midnight with my industry,
my due euphoric industry of lovemaking

I sing of them how wolves grey
as dull dead staring coins
sing to their fatherly monster hiding

half the day away while people
strain their blood against the walls
of my body parts and sewers and hot mouths

until I tire of telling them I’m here
and begin to let them wander across me
saying not a word but parsing them their monotony.

Dedicated to C. McGuire.

The boy is strong now
but five years past
if the moon where his mothers lives
tells me right he was slim
weak pale and happy.
Happy until his tonsils
stroked his happy throat
too hard one night
while he watched his television
scramble naked men and women.
His brother says the moon
where their mother lives had nothing
to do with it, as next-door,
he played with friends
who can’t recall a damn thing
about why he panted and why he sang
every Sunday, but not at home.
Quite above the Earth
on the moon hides under dust
in a crater the body of a woman
who wept herself dry and walked away.

Somewhere in a wheat field
trounced daily by four-legged
walking leather the circus of help

extends all its hands
into old dead monsters and into their oil.
The circus cracks boys’ limbs

until the happiness pours and swallow
many men and women and children
as if happiness were berries

or alcohol or a family
of long animals well berried
furless and addicted to their own bodies.

Underneath that oil blacker
than the four pupils staring at each other
inches apart near a hundred other creatures

two-legged and furless and long
into the night the circus of help
finally holds its pleasing knuckles

up to the sky and the sky sees nothing
but families helping
each other to touch each other.