“I began that work twenty years ago.  When I have finished, I shall
     Take it away with me in that coffin and never wake up again.”
                                                        —The Phantom of the Opera

   
Liberty flies at them who meditate on too many lectures;
While I passively compose love fallacies.

Does the cure lie in tarot faces, the human death card? 
For you, Jupiter, a pristine diagnosis.
Fools come in elongated manners, in total maxims
Corporate, a dingy sorrow as credit to an ill Ioue,

A Georgian anguishing over peculiar operatic comedies;
The genius heroine qualified at the final lap,
Rapped merely and gratefully on the central meridian of
Raoul, whose furtive lust for Boetian undies
Brings an urgency of latent composure.

Therefore, I am dire, an olive pastor whose adulterated
Ideas are ox-shed tunic ponchos!
The mute consensus in the face of what we have:
The lonely agent eats the early cumulous!
 
 

MOTHERESE, A MYTH

In the spring, I sheltered two beasts under my rib,
Sucking an eve out of one bone — an eve no an ewe,
We did away with season and color burns cobalt eye
That never learned the difference between blue and 
A sky with silver lining. With steel-toed tongues 
I lap porridge and boiled rake, scan your map for
Dexterity errors but find nothing as result I am mute,

Wrap a blanket around old Bessie and take myself to the land 
And lake — I am your sulphuric son, a bone you picked from 
Your teeth once the fish quit its phantom flailing, the sheep
Are garbling words but my flock, my bravado staves hunger;
 
Daughter comes crawling out of a portioned gullet, a misty
Presence akin to the town ghost, pale, misshapen, technically 
Harmless, I encircle her head with a thousand May sprigs
And say hullabaloo how do you do it, peacefully mister
I rise in the morning and groan the jargon of animals:

Day broke again like a yolk, the chickens in their coops
Flaunt tallow breasts ripe for old man pillager’s quest for
Meat, bless the cock. Little did he know the chickens
Have created a coup, entreated by their leader, a barnyard
Tiger who’s seen it all and tired of the sukhas running
Around with their heads cut off, Trotksy announced today 
Is the day to rock your head back and forth, let it go, 

Break open a few ribs and burst with the pride that 
You’re no longer attached at the heart and center — 

To keep the little needling warm she exchanged one bone
For two right ones and every time she heard a song she liked,
Her two hearts went bathuthud-bathuthud. On the day of 
The modern quake, when chicken wings soared, her heart snapped —
How the other made up for the lapse without missing a beat