(Three Poems)
Setting a hand down in moss or something that feels like you feeling it
Our hero: opening a fat dictionary. Pressing its springy palm flesh with his finger pads. Finding an entry. With a flip from his thumbnail, a hatch. He pulls out a bunch of musical notes, tangled like golf clubs. From a further room the sick diesel motor of a show about zombies.
Not on my watch, says Weaselbird. He’s been martial all morning. Waxing literal, he stands with one talon all scrunched up like he’s gonna make an off-tackle run.
Ok then, then! Missing finger, a tattler. Legs, deserter. Tongue, talked. Hand, stole. But…head? Good one, Weaselbird, I say, but how do you know it isn’t elsewhere warning oppositely?
Ya don’t, he grins, good lord, such a grin.
I will hit you only once you little Jesus Christ
Beside the jellyfish hood of a fitted sheet, six condoms are sullenly out to dry. Less meaty than the fabrics, now and then a little stiff musicbox comb action. A thrifty performance artist with designs on the bridge and tunnel crowd, I suppose, says Weaselbird.
I myself use misspelling to connect with people. My favorite thing in Montreal is to see bilingual signs where both languages are wrong, and the grammar is way wrong, and there are corrections which make the whole thing, on both sides, more wrong. I never got the sneerers. It has such sweet, douchy sense.
One day when we’re both sexually irrelevant, we’ll muse over the bothersome minefield between nakedness and nudity. In our time, people will, mark my words, depilate entirely and irrevocably. Their eyeholes will be made alien giant and they will have a loop atop their head they hang on a hook to sleep. I never saw so much stretching. As if life itself were one big cramp. Like Sardinian senicide in reverse. So much, Weaselbird says, for contemporary dark humorous verse. Such serious mouth we have. As Flannery might say:
The better to purse you with.
Some vast cleverness keeps us in skinbags
Happiness is asking for trouble. Ibid. caution. Intention’s the root and further the spongy shaft phloem xylem leaves and seed pods of all joking. For example, the apollonian bees so kneejerk with rectitude all dance unmaps; ha! judgy little shits. Yours will be a legacy of drop kicks. And the queen never liked you, she pulled stakes on the franchise and what do you think now about a string of pancake places in the southwest?
Fuzz on wind: sweet. Fruit: sinister, strategic. Everything delivers. And is action regardless valence. Ah you’re all verbal and no math, Weaselbird twits. There’s such things as thingy things and they are, whoa, right here in my right talon right. Now! From behind your ear. From your nose hole. From your brain hole. It’s still 25 cents. No matter what high sounding interpretation might by ye wise ones be put upon it.
Can’t say I’m sorry the interruption. Who knows should the pilot take. What is wisdom but some overcalm folding of one primary color into its blank backside until you seem not twee cuz you got… a crane! a box! whoa, adventure rocket ship! Once hot pool to cold in a Japanese baths did a door in my forehead open. Seems I’d for some time been, never really minded being, a cuckoo clock. And chimed. The arc of little archers and wooing woodmen shall return home. Give it time: the third verse is same as the first.
Meanwhile, we’ll hang our worries up on bone and call down to ourselves from where we’re always waiting.