The Mountain Shawled and Shingled
“A clod of matter in a tattered cloud, to scatter in the short-lived day…”
Pruritic mountain, Cumberland’s triangle
Friend, recumbent by a meadow that is
A monument to the ineffability of buffalo
Hides. Come, come; nobody is impressed
By truth, nobody but the earth. So you
Are no dictator school; a shattered gravity
And hoi polloi enthusiasm grips the crag
Of majesty in your circle jerk’s all-seeing
Purview. Recumbent by a meadow that is
Heaven drunk on memory, then hell is
Shamed by form. Or so it seems. I’d utter
You a pyramid. You’re one lip mouth is
Quiet: I assume it’s full. With horses made
Of thunder in your minutes made of deer,
The law of relativity’s most lawless relative
Is here; that is, recumbent by a meadow.
A monument to the ineffability of buffalo
Is broken-hearted land where animals
Have tasted air and souls have never been
(Because the air’s too thin); the surface of
The soul is there for you to rest your feet.
Are you the keeper’s kit of cost that’s kept
In lover’s lost? Corrupting all the dead men’s
Minds, a flub was just inevitable – you meant
Shechita? Come, nobody here’s compressed
By shouldering a giant less than Atlas. Beauty is
The reason to enslave a passion, bonny wheels
Inventing you and me. And fire goes on
Inventing love, our ailment and the cure, but
Honestly is never sure. The taste of cyanide in
Rommel’s fate is like our taste in women: hid
From comatose commissions; bid them rest.
I am nobody: earth, the truth and you. But
Sycophants’ vaudevillian shores, with offerings
To future gods, are like a Benedict that naturally
Has been a dick. In Babel’s prison your misprision
Labeled freedom. The beagle’s bark from you
Set sail. If life is only guaranteed some air, and
Maybe seconds, nothing’s there to top your peak
Of horns and furnace; not the earthy truth.
A shattered gravity: the wrong light died;
The right tree’s left hand listened. Sticks that
Beta-tested stones were never meant to cherish
Bones. But hip-hop says that Lil Myrrhder
Loves the moths and mud; the shingles, shawl
And price of sprawl. His lyric – “the banana peel
Of worship is a warship” – strikes my ear as
Fallen from a tree, unlike dictator schools.
Euthanasia’s purge and carnage hula-hoop
Around you, striped and starry, stream into
Your pleasure dam’s decree; the conflagration
Nixed where I had wandered, loathsome as a
Bloodclot. Foul and artificial soul without a god;
The goldest fish and deadest stone make up
The constellation you address: a moiety of
Watercress. To slip police a euphemistic thought,
These woods deliberate on itchy days. What marrow
Mountains offer – tournament of egg and steel,
The steppe of brawny ceremony – is not easily
Ignored. With dragons gone, you’re all that’s left
For scale; we sing of that injustice. Limestone
Praises you: the afterlife that bivouacked on
Nature’s lap; these staggered worlds for all the girls
To stage a bounty, seamless seamstresses of scenes
Accentuated by your silence; a word unfettered
From its lot of letters – not a birdless feather; (April
Has the cruelest software, bad advice like “Dream
And be responsible”; others say religion, art and
Politics are dynamos to counter rule); a deuce of
Stockholm sickness; ATP and steam from Riker’s
Island (objects made of death are nothing more
Than grass, a table or a bad decision); mind of
Middle fingers mining gaps (the soul of inspiration –
“Anything is possible”: as stupid as the devil’s idle).
You balderdash an arch into the sky as dumb as
Archibald MacLeish’s moon; I’ll see you up there
Soon, a pen and fifteen pennies spent on our
Eternal noon, with Qwerty’s sunlit nostrils snorting
Stardust that betrayed your stamina for gold –
Purpuric and majestic captain in me: as you were.