Drowning in Diet Malts with Druig
In the desert,
in the midday time,
he would meet me at the celestial soda counter on Tuesdays,
wearing bovver boots and a leather choker studded with sardonyx
— the exosuit of a peregrine.
The entire duppy congregation set immediate fire to itself every time.
There was myomancy in his murmur,
Chekhov’s gun in his cheeks,
and an intercepted treaty,
waxed and blued and vulcanized,
right where you’d think his tiger-in-the-tank ought to be.
The sugar orchards of Vermont still know nothing of this level of funeral-fox sweetness.
By grab, most men this Georgic in the face are either vaudeville or Visigoth at heart,
all pewter or pearl.
These are not safe moorings.
They stay tangled like sun serpents in the seedbed,
irretrievably twisted up in the dismal comedy of being vulgarian boars,
but his whole way of being from the jump had the ambit of the springbok.
He didn’t have weather inside him that would change its mind about you,
and all his most eloquent talking occurred in nonlanguage avenues.
His lip-stillness would chew you in two.
Like me, he rallied against all ideas of entrapment
and said things like:
“You do realize if you ‘ban billionaires’ you blacklist Batman”
and “a free margin requires credulity.”
There are things about being poor that it is hard to put a pattern of dignity on,
but he would exhale and turn poverty into Pierce-Arrows
and leprosy into La Scala.
Punishingly self-aware and never self-reverent,
the remnants of an ancient forest sunbathed in the top-left corner of his t’s.
King of a thousand powers,
even his scars were Terpsichorean, I noticed,
as he tied a knot of lavender up in the fold of my dress.
Me in a hundred pieces on the syrup-drunk floor.
Blessedly stuck. Devilishly shrove all the more.
A little skate of leaves rushing across the road under my January tires preceded him
this last time.
Our trysting places repeated backward to us sounded like bullies
whining about the consequences of the rules they broke.
Dean Young said that poets should be busy making birds, not birdcages,
and I took that idiopathic instruction to heart in every task,
whether I was macerating rose vinegar or staking out space for audio aromatics.
We were on a touch-me-not trip they just couldn’t do.
I have heard it said that a good run doesn’t stay with the steed forever,
but I think that’s for people who don’t realize:
a good story doesn’t just copy life,
it pushes back on it too,
and the turbine that could translate my turbulence had yet to scrape at cirrus clouds before him.
Anything less would have been beneath his urbanity.
It was Chanel that took women out of corsets,
and he that at last showed the potted circus
what a real Will Rogers moment looked and felt like
when it comes in the form of a masculine rime and rout
that leaves no forwarding address
save the Irish novena that was his first (and remains his best) form of noblesse.
Our kind, we adore and live by your Keith Flint,
but we do not get fat off your land.
Mine Umwelt
I say we bring viciousness and menace back in style, post haste.
I am sick past final fits of your bird-hearse breed of typographical tales,
your demolition by neglect,
and the way you try to tart up your paper entomology love in archival Puma,
hoping that no one catches on to the statement-making tropical heroine ebb in your life,
or the platitudes-by-the-pint cut with conformist vice that form your connective hex
to everyone you know.
I should not have had every night and morning of my life with you
suffused by a prayer for Mab’s intercession.
The Crolly boulder would have rolled for us, you do realize.
Sure it would have split open too at the sound of our hot fuss.
How could I know we were solving for scattershot that whole time
as far as you were concerned?
We gutterflowers of the Ceryneian Hind kind are known to the wider Comanche
for our own branch of buffalo seances.
Bataireacht, Shillelagh, Brides of the Crystal Comet,
it is chypre, leather, and lily for our necks,
not your labyrinth of bridges or fire escapes overlooking fig trees.
A garden soiree in a rapier atelier, you say?
My goodness, but your man-till impulses have branded you like pig iron.
“Extinguish the English!,” the boys from the better land will crow.
That’s realmy enough for your blind bearer party, isn’t it?
I won’t be able to argue much, but
I will think only of your kind in those last seconds before your holibobs go.
They say love is sacred sightlessness, the cataract of Aphrodite.
Setting a candle to a saint only she could see,
I become once again the bunny under a buck moon
that is five-feet-sweet of grasshopper couture you could never afford.
Everywhere I smell Red Door I think: my Mamaw has been here before.
Here is the real something-seen-but-soon-forgotten score:
The freedom of this life is purchased with the coin of discipline,
not your honeyed lights nor your daddy fights,
not in places where you don’t know about drives for fun
or with “women” who don’t chase the kismet through the sun.
You will likely always remember me as a guest and a spy, at best,
but I was the auditory shibori that will keep you on your live-long knees;
I will echo like echinoderms for you,
like the books that remember their trees.
A Flick-Knife for Fiachra
In equal measure, I like a menu you’d need to pass an exam to read
and places where a cat crossing the street is an event,
something pleasurably sideways and topical in its Romancewards, palacebound purity.
Imprimatur is a patchwork picnic after all,
and it’s no orthographic coincidence of the soul
that born stutterers do not stumble over their syllables at all when speaking to animals.
Like a Calabrian stranger on a five-masted schooner
headed someplace where pale yellow show-pony pansies toss their frosted forelocks
at what remains of April,
I knew you just wanted to feel sorry for things and that this was your only verb.
Husbandmen of a Hera-hammered sort jump up on my finger like crickets.
They think they are going to be lynching anything in lavender cargoes like mine as a leisure,
but I was to be a rock concert under glass whether their unspoken greed said I might or not.
Down in Mobile, Lorenzo the titty-rapper cheers me onward atop his grime-encrusted throne
at the midnight petrol station forgotten by all but the cruciverbalists and reggaetoneros,
as does orange-faux-hawked Heather at Starland Emporium in Nashville,
who knew all of Marianne Moore’s dismissed-out-of-hand names for the Edsel by heart,
but held a special place for Mongoose Civique and Utopian Turtletop.
The gulls steer the galleons here and we embrace the ghazal,
considering it a “sashtray” sequela and imbibing its lapsus linguae
with something of the vespertine.
You were just an anti-cosmic cadging ole Caliban
who had never pressure-tested his need for potations.
Blagging me ruthlessly day in and day out for over a year,
craving my pointy vowels and hard R’s and fox grapes
every bit like you salaciously salivated over any straight spine,
you got close to a boutique version of Ged’s quantum entanglement with words of power
in Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea when you were with me.
But, anon, my flocks of languages were prone to name only Davids
in what slaves and schemers with no broadside background or starboard singularity
had cruelly sold you as your noble Goliath war,
and bless but you didn’t care a boffin’s tea towel for the tidal truth this made you toe and tow.
No one needed Bellingcat or even a Chicago overcoat to see how this would all play out.
With no intention whatsoever of breaking a sweat to change
any of the “heartbreaking” elements (read: bad choices) of the human world
you claimed to care so much about,
perhaps it would have been prudent for you to explore the message in how
your moving-on muscle is still the only toned one in your body.
This is never a sign of a life well-lived,
despite what the other lifeless ones told you whilst they were robbing you of any future
capable of conjuring a cymbal wash bright enough to hold my mulberry chenille.
Maybe an answering machine is just a tweet you could throw if you were angry?
The despised scribes tell of a time you were lying your teeth out
to overfull, fully unformed females so daily drunk (mostly on their own blinding torpor)
that their eyes were bloodshot even in black and white photos.
You needed that badly to believe in lab-created star power because you knew no one before me
who had been born in anemone crinolines marking trails with the matronymic Moon Bears.
For all my cola cherries and computer paper I could not comprehend you for this,
but there goes your next Dawn Powell into her potter’s field grave.
Mace. Morning star. Man catcher.
Me:
Petit Basset Griffon Vendéen
Glissandeur
The Last Stabled Sky
Pan Am in Pink
Hallowed Inkies
Two-Bullet Situation
Black Garrison Britsadie
A Hot & A Half
Wolf Laurel
Your sworn anti-hero convalescing under a blanket of concentrated reverb by then,
I stood still enough not to disturb the rafter of wild turkeys foraging
just under my sunroom window,
and I thought about how May of 1862 was the first and only time in America’s history
wherein a sitting president assumed direct control of armed forces to launch a military campaign.
This was Lincoln in the Civil War.
And here I was.
Reduced to nothing more than holding my Burt Reynolds beefcake pose for you,
watching you passively thieve all my flashing bracken and supernatural metallics,
only to stretch them and me crosswise with thwarts like some pliable, in-progress canoe
—because this is what you were used to.
Astute students of Arcana will recall:
as both a triangular figure and the sum of all the decimal digits,
45 is a right royal number indeed.
It paints so primly,
in Calabrese licorice-like colors,
across the base of an odalesque,
(which you should know is the ancestor of the modern-day pinup),
don’t you think?
Plexi-drive Poesia: In Twin Parts
The Black-Eyed Waltz
Before you, King Krampus, killed Christmas that first year
with the advection frost of your embalmed empathy,
you came to call me ‘Kristina of Sweden’ like you always should have done,
even if you did only whisper it quietly to your entirely Anglo-regional record collection,
under your breath,
like the secret of us wasn’t thick-coated in a layer of high-visibility aquamarine.
We had something called the black-eyed waltz
back when you were in the kindest death and the ribbons streamed down your back.
That big bag of McCains on your shoulder,
an invention as unoriginal as the rest of your choices,
crimped your walk a little, but I still thought you were so Ken Loach.
Strangeways Here We Come,
but that was just an irascible primer on expectancy followed by black despair.
Our warrior years, you wear them well.
All I ever asked is that you be loyal and lyrical,
but all you do now is steal horses and fortune-tell,
all observational limits and scribal mistakes loud enough to leave anyone deaf for days.
My legs go jello at the cruelty of your customs and excise.
You didn’t know a thing about campanology,
but you sure reminded the whole assembled party of Conrad’s storm-tossed boatswain,
you know the one, he drops into a bunker
only to find himself descended into a brawl over silver with a load of Chinese coolies,
hardened by living all of life inside your same lame lee of labor and lack.
But me and my unreasonable sun,
we ask for inquisitive respect and sight as our only tolls,
and you’ll find we can out-snob anyone in the perfect universe of rumor,
even and perhaps especially your doomed decisions
and the shiftless coffin ships you call your casual comrades.
The bleak cash-on-the-barrelhead emotional habitat that raised you
has taught you to wince at anything bright and incoming,
and the frog-strangling rain is surely no place for any meteor.
I’ll make you only one concession there:
bring me a 1933 Packard Victoria Lebaron in a caramel color,
still with flowers on the passenger seat, please.
It will feed your need for uniformity and mine for that which is favonian.
— my guerdon for your grey,
my Simbelmynë (ever-mind) in your dray,
and my lagniappe as the only lay
owning your mind.
As for Kingsfoil and Brandywine Bridge, well…another time.
Your fear of wise blood and the river that ran from my heart to my mouth
to the rope-obliterating razor in your hand
made you tear strips from everybody and ride double throughout the land,
just to try to prove a point,
and one that started out blunter than the ink ladle I would use to cut out your heart.
You couldn’t be convinced to go do something you already paid for,
or that inculcating cuckold culture had previously bought you.
Even though even your cleverest spoonerisms come lapping milk you’ve bought on credit
from hand-me-down spoons.
I’ll keep hunting the soniferous boy who chases (both me and the telos of the atom),
a heartbeat bombardier unmarred by any of your radical social surgeries.
Fed by gold and spasmodic as an eel, he won’t be drinking your juniper gin
or know a thing about vigesimal voir dire.
I expect he’ll be all cold-steel contradistinction and working in encaustics,
somewhere like Sleeping Bear Dunes.
He’ll have to be at least 17 years older than me
as it’s nearly impossible to have anything but pure contempt for the younger generations.
Barely a one of them has the fortitude to be from a truly debauched country.
Orcades
In your honesty box, I found autumnal wings I’m certain you stole from Circe’s grotto.
You, the fake spiritualist whose only holy is Darwin’s annual Beer Can Regatta,
a dual agonist,
a chiseling rat (like in White Christmas).
You like Chopin in ‘45 –real talent baldly popularized.
The promiscuous capacity of your dread lifescape
has made of you an unsuitable welterweight with an aegis like a Belgian botanist,
no spirometry to your civil vocation at all,
no bouquets of pinecones either,
and you’re out there every day, spending all your love on pinkos and pandies and Stingo
faster than a blue joke.
You do the natural vulgarity of words such a terrible disservice.
Here is the edict of the paradigmatic swains like you:
you know mickle much when you’re taking the mickey
doing all the damnable acts of a jail-barge sarge
— him and me — eating our confetti —
cake in our coral kingdom, oblivious to your sugared hate
sleeping with the razor gangs and singing your loyalist song.
And this granite lithology of my extra-sensorialists:
encircled in powder-blue butterflies
you and me the courting cuttles
aigre-doux
a couple of twin LeeLoos in a grocery cart
no matter what you’ve done to me, a love as big as mine for you was never wrong.
Oh, you didn’t think I knew
about your Ahmet Ertegun and your Eve Babitz too.
You thought you would make me one of your Mancunian Morvern Callars,
as if I were a cobbler on Capitol Hill,
selling the lectures of an activist rather than actually being one.
Must every cygnet in your world be a busted flush in waiting?
Who would ever have thunk?
It would be this little sweetfeed Finn-Tale-teller in the rock tomb,
with her Honor Fleet decked out in cinnamon brooms
idling in the ocean’s engine rooms,
the jaguar tasked with teaching sun and surfcraft
to all those curated Capricorns….
I was up the duff at the same time as Kate Moss,
thank you very much,
and playing your inner song on my fairy’s fife.
Being an ambivert, like Jep Gambardella and Melchior, I didn’t just want to go to the parties,
I wanted to have the power to make them a failure.
In your adopted disfluency, you claim now that I don’t know you.
I stutter back from the double-bred womb: “Just lucky I guess.”
What’s the Rushbearer Word for Deirfiúr Again?
Watch out for that unscented varietal of woman up yonder.
Even a closeted Yank-yanker like you will discover her abs (visible ones!)
cannot be purchased (not even rented by the weekday hour, the bitch)
with the abstruse politesse and platitudes that makes the already softer-drawn homegrown ones pliant for you.
We girl-bodied gulf fritillaries will sluice-gate scoff when we put a butchering ax
right through the cleft in the Cleaver of you, Little Boy Bleutral.
You like your women obstetrical and emollient, quite clearly.
Now, I have to ask:
Is that for the requisite wraparound or the reacharound services that come with that intrinsic lack
of radionuclide Romance and Eudemian ethics? Or both?
Your frictionless character says more even than the preliminary message
in your bottomlessly horrible mediocrity
about the forgetful toadyism and the specious revival of a repulsive self
that have made uranium decay of all your horn-mad inner unicorns.
Mercy (not Merseyside), man.
You needed a burner phone when that decrypted-by-Dido dossier dropped
and I made that dirty cloud-putty of all you thought was your comeliest cladding.
In case you didn’t know:
Sensu lato is for sleeveens
bushido is for bastards,
and you love just about like dilatory lidar,
weakened by ductways and parasites,
rejected by your creedal herd but convinced you are their captain.
Will you ever find this out now that all my anemone-bonhomie has fled
the ultra-non-fleadh of your flimsy, flea-market feelings?
Oh, the ole olllam of it, old boy.
Of Picasso and plurality I can see I should not have expected so much of you.
While you were undergoing some kind of clandestine liquidation,
you ascertained that choosing agreeableness over virtue (because virtue draws inimical blood)
was a soulless selection a solid five atmospheres too low
to be hospitable to my hepatica-holding heart and legerity-rooted love.
My initial part in your ball-less Balanchine (feet and other) was to die on stage every night
at the fuming intersection of what you said versus what you didn’t,
my stomach clicking at every unspoken limit,
your nitwittery utterly off the cob.
As if I was ever made to walk into the Ouse of an oaf like you.
You should have come to me with your iodine tablets
rather than your mimeographed alibis (nothing but Mom-approved arson)
and your swindler’s memoranda blazing, schmendrick.
This is Rodmell Village with a Riddler-ready RBMK reactor on the runway,
didn’t you know?
There’s a tinselly carousel-to-go running round it where the horses are half ocean wave as well.
You should have thanked me for your every synapse collapsing
because of what I kicked open in your mind.
There is a reason our AC/DC sang of those Rocky-fied American thighs,
as I know you have now fully surmised. (Smize).
But of course, like a male Olive Oil with weaker-drawn features,
your strip-mined mind has gone noseblind to your own cumin-colored, undeclared ideologies.
I deracinated each and every one you held closest to your unstylishly tattered chest pocket.
The rest I picked off like a competitive sharpshooter
when you tried next to assign me the role of frostbitten coyote bait
in the wilderness of your mute paralysis.
Waylayed is your only laid but it is perhaps fortunate that you cannot smell this either.
You hamstrung hucksters and your verve-less Von Restorff Effect.
Just another vector for Northernism.
What’s gigglesome is:
I am quite certain Richard Ashcroft would despise your positive void coefficient
as much or more than I do.
You are not what he sings for, to, or about, “lovely” lout-o-drought.
Had he harbored a head like yours, he never would have sung at all.
Think on that, you tactician and tout.
What was your amazement to find that your reflexively anti-American attitude
bespeaks a doltish doctrine you are deaf to and drunk on, but I am not.
All your enthusiasms being collateral in nature should strike you heat-absence-exchanger hard
as it is redamancy for which there is no legal redress,
and one for which the turbine rundown of your piteous postal code has never been an excuse.
I am so blastedly bored of you bragging about your borrowed Borodino.
A Celt-o-selk like natty little me is for those night-horse, snow-horse, thunder-horse hooleys,
honeyyy,
for Cicero’s speeches and cab giggles,
for proper pied-piper princes and piezocrystals.
It’s supposed to feel like found footage of a friendship that had gone glitteringly by
whole annus mirabilises before it began.
If life doesn’t last forever, how could death, I will reason,
as I torch every last clubbed cubic foot of the X-rated xenon fogging your timid tenterframes.
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