Death's Cheerless Circus

I. CONTEXT

My kin and I
Peered with Floridian gecko eyes
Out of cardboard-shuttered windows
Down into parking lots that breathed
Life, roads jellied with organisms
Among which, I relay:
The beautifully patterned young women
The fat jawed men-to-be, including me
Reflected in the glass pane
And these and more
The feathered, weathered scholar professors
Whitman’s learned astronomers
Eliot’s Phoenician sailors cat-calling
Ginsberg’s own marine seraphim
These colors, and more
Streets strewn in littered directions
Ungodly street sign erections
I hate the city,
It gives me chills at night warm beneath
The state-mandated furs
Hewn from hides of those in China
Elderly veterans of dynasties past
Pricking themselves earning 5 cents
A fucking day.
And you want me to fall asleep
One morning never blink awake
Into the hellish purgatory
Where men deliver my body to
The industrial morgue, among the
Storied homeless, who spent
Long years feeding pigeons.
And with sweet cremation fire
Rise, rise, rise upwards
Into the dismal, ghostly pollution
Singing napalm song into
Oblivion

II. BEYOND THE GRAVE

The interesting, picturesque
Human beings below
Stand in line
For Starbucks
And they are all smiling
As I, an
Uncombed specter
Try to hide the blood
In my sinister eyes
That search and
Scan the crowd
Like a Floridian gecko
Tongue flicking
Never blinking
My vision
Collapsed
Into
A
Tunnel
Gushing
Arterial
Sprays
Of
Cum
And
Coffee
Now
Everyone
Is
Exhausted
Lethargic
Crippled
By
Double-
Consciousness
Self-consciousness
That is the
Withheld kiss

What could
Have
Been?

III. ALL A SHAM

“It’s all a sham,” says the black and white
Crook on the television screen, contesting
My laptop’s sleepless glow
And I entertain that thought.

It follows me into nightmares
Like a stray dog I don’t want
To feel responsible for kicking
So I don’t, and it follows me.

It follows me, ceaselessly
Into thickets, dense and thorny
Where the fog drips around
My pale ankles like pond water.

Pan out, and cut, sounds
The shattering snap of the Director
And the scene is finished, it’s a rap
As for me, there is no after.

The boiling studio lights
Extinguish in a procession of
Myriad clicks, succeeding into
A black devoid of company.

But what is this against my leg
At the bend of my knee
The stray dog that had, earlier,
Followed me.

Except, when I look down
It is a mammoth crustacean
Multi foliate shell, shedding
The shuddering pill bug:

Paranoia

So I look straight into the
Bulbous, glossy face of the camera
Lit red by a single dim flame
“It’s all a sham,” I say, “Such a shame.”

IV. TREE SAP

I rested in the branches
That had nested around me
The nestles that held aloft
An amalgam of floral sheets.

Far above in cloudy blankets
Water wept like blue yarn
Which curled upon me
Issuing an incubating warmth.

Far below on the forest floor
Buried with canopy leaves
And ripened fruit
Ashen, embryonic soot.

There was a thick armed
Creature, snorting at the sky
With a face like mine
But twice as wrinkled.

A heavy brow that folded
Over cartilage and meaty
Bolded features warped over
The growling mouth of that sickly ape:

Slothful Rationale

It shook my tree in its
Powerful, masculine grasp
Thick fingers that pulled and
Pushed the trunk’s heaving mast

There is no more fruit on
These stems, I’ve no more to give
You, the ancestral beast of man
Strangling with rough Neanderthal hands

I can convince myself to
Mistake the vibrations’ weep
And, in this swollen cradle,
Drift slowly back to sleep.

V. HAIL HAILE SELASSIE

I have bastardized my best
Perceptions a hundred times
In pursuit of a subtle rhyme
Scheme that might impress.

But to have found what
I was searching for is so
Exciting that I can scarcely
Describe just what is next.

Indulgence in phone calls
To family homes with rented space
Headphones worn in bathroom
Stalls, a rattled fall from grace.

In my head, a sinking dread
That reflects all of romance
In its smallest, tapered point
Thinking little of it.

There is no rhythm really
To this rhyme scheme
Most of my words don’t mean
Anything too obscene.

Still, I want to roar them
Pour them from my throat
And bearded mane and
Have everybody know my name:

Self-Aggrandizement

That rotting lion which slinks
Through Savannah heat waves
Beneath the tides of bleached
Bone barrens stretching far away.

But out in the rural spans
The starlight is so clear and
Removes me, frees me from my
Urbanite reality.

VI. SUMMER SCENE

Toady, trenches full of
Lily pads and lilies
Their pallid petals steadied
Through the evening gale.

I waded along, a long
Way until at last I came
To a silent forked sound
Split by rooted, fern-ished ground.

The surface of the stream
Clung to my Godly clothing
Creeping, like weeping wet nuns
At a consecrating altar.

My naked, splintered feet
Treading coral porous stone
Hidden under dust and loam
Kicking broken bottles.

In such an agitated state,
I uttered my confused praise
To that lightless fly that buzzes sexually,
The word of which is:

Sycophancy.

Trapped in monument mud
Rich with rocks and gems alike
I tilled the soil with my heels
Struggling to reveal.

The lines which memory
Serves as peerlessly beautiful
Which I studied through schoolbooks
Long ago, crouching in sacred libraries.

Where that ape,
Pill bug, lion and
Lightless fly
Now reside.

This is the moment in which I reside.