A Warrant of Crows

(while considering “The Drunken Boat” by Jean Nicholas Arthur Rimbaud)  
    
In first ray’s light, the empty crows descend,    
Black beaks that tear apart the road’s edge death,    
Urine caressed, the end of tony night,    
Reflecting steams of neon sputters end.    
     
How graceful silks arise above the blood.    
How leather’s polished gaze in gentile steps,    
From stone to stone, avoids the gentile muck,    
The gentile eyes that never find its flood.    
     
The white plates’ stack, the grace of black hat crows,    
Who find in sweet disgust, the fault that lies    
Beneath, the folded, creased in linens’ damp,    
That waits to take the loves expressed in those.    
     
With wash of rain that should in grace absolve,    
Raise up the vomit stench of soirees’ hopes,    
Despaired in bottles spent in night’s disgust,    
To rise again in dawning crows’ resolve.      
     
The city bright, the sun that warms in light,    
So bright, in teaming streets of fractured life    
The base in maggots’ lace, in catacombs    
Of prophets’, saints’, and artists’ feinted blight.    
     
In cabs that merely pause our turpitude,      
The parks and views that needles barely mark,    
How swift the windows rise reflecting masques    
Of ever-present streaming death’s exude.    
     
The defecating streets bloom in flowers,    
In Lawns, hedges, perfect cuts of bleeding    
Sap that stains in ungloved foreign tending,    
That own no place but own its full power.    
     
Her pinkest ruffled crinolines that glide,    
My softest hands that find her pinkest throat,    
The surest kiss that flashes red on hills    
That speak of blood and parks of skulls reside.    
     
In irons wrought of tight pain closing locks,    
In smells of lilac’s barely covered piss    
In swiftest want to brace my overcome,    
To gauge the storm and putrid chiming clocks.    
     
The blinding white of virgin frock sustains    
The day of dirt-brown mud in garden lakes,    
The cattails sprout like turgid members thrust    
To sun from rotting throat, like song’s refrain.    
     
The berry gash of haunted eyes betrays,    
As party afternoons of rose dead light    
That swirl like talk and whirlpools’ catching fate,    
That languid sense of gravestones' lingered gaze.    
     
So, she and I in languid congress sweat,    
Release in mourners’ grey, as passionless      
As blood-flecked mucus handkerchiefs in sleeves    
Of Paris silks, and Persian’s fouled regret.    
     
She smiles, my slow flowing erase that pools    
Below the diamond crusted snout of love,    
That seeps in languid path to evening clothes,    
That stains her voice like pomegranate stools.    
     
Latrines of soft mahogany inlaid      
With truest ivory that bucks and scales,    
Buboes in bone tureens of turtle soup,    
With every silver spoon, the rot’s repaid.    
     
In streets that fly, with reservations’ thrush    
That lights by rusted trees and feathers preen,    
That seeks in road-side dirt the grubs, the worms    
Of soul to wretch in mouths of evening’s lush.    
     
The tables held like horses’ skittered reigns,    
With welcome chairs’ extend like manacles,    
The steams of china’ed muck, the Champaign spills    
And Bordeaux seeps like liv’ried menstrual stains.    
     
We dance like ghouls on crystal graveyard edge    
As waiters change the spoons for Aztec knives,  
In fingered loss, as orchestra withdraws,    
We thrust over the heart a feral pledge.    
     
Our hearses gape for laughter born of tombs    
Yet still we laugh in hymns of falling bones,    
For youngish night with razors slowly cuts,    
As tattered children hope to lick the wounds.    
      
How easily our opened mouths, like caves,    
The stench of gourmet carrion perfume,    
Extend in serpent conversations’ lull    
The taste of flesh that stillborn life enslaves.    
     
We burst in warrens held by those still whole,    
Who grimace at our putrefied refines;    
Who stare, prepared to kill the ridicule    
Of those who’d steal their very lives’ extol.    
     
The undead rot that drinks their beer and speak    
As if these streets were ours from our unbirth,    
We peck and caw, attempts to stay death’s path,    
But suns will rise with other tearing beaks.    
     
How crystal crypts still sing in torch-like dirge,    
With candle waves, as storks in aprons pass    
In absinthe curves, their thoughts of life’s revenge,    
In darks that creep like poison’s wasting surge.      
     
Though I push hard at Death’s forever press,    
That I redress in gallons of her blood,    
A flood of sanguine nose-gays bought from skulls,    
This earth can barely swallow my confess.  
     
What gay cadavers! bound in heaven’s bloat    
Of signs imparted, carved into our souls,    
Of taxis’ blare like banshees’ lulling screech,    
Like retching joy expelled from drunken boat.    
     
The skies betray a dawn of grey stone rows,    
The owls have long since torn their mice to shreds,    
The dead have long since festered in my dreams,    
And claimed by her blood a warrant of crows.