To hell with the meaning--let's unsuck some sounds!
Two fat black & yellow bumblebees rolling like Romans
in the poppy's luscious cup, let's rumble down, reader--
drown ourselves in juxtapositions slick as the middle of an almond--
let's find old friends--men named Max Memo
& that bastard slasher Irishman Cutter Harrigan--
I want to name 'em all again,
vowelwise by altered light, want to walk rain-sopped
among stone-shearers in sheep-slopped meadows--
Hello? Hello? When will it end and the wild be found:
in what wheat & water, what wheat, what water...
When the elm whines, longs to lose its leaves?
When the beetles and nematodes marry?
When our President urges an immersion in Persian poetry?
When your friends, raving, set aflame their sharpened staves,
run to your rescue in some sundering of nothingness?
What? What friends?
Colonel Urinal? Brother Fagus Blunt?
Don't kid yourself, kid. They won't.
Then what about that other when--
when the spines of prickly pears are on your lips
as you stumble through the rubble of Peloponnesus?
When the sherpas smooch your iceburnt cheeks on your return
from Anapurna? No--never--not then--not there--
but here!-- just past the asteroids, under your last blunder,
aside your astraddling bride, out in shout's shooting range,
your beautiful voice: wild, powerful as sauerkraut,
resounding.
Gerald Fleming
Contents | Mudlark No.
3
| 42 | 44 |