Vorspiel u. Denoument

Vorspiel & Denouement

The kitchen vase turned to swamp

Three days ago.

At breakfast, I dug

Fingernails into the necks of flowers,

Left to discolor in the wastebasket

Like bilious sunlight through

A screen door in the maids’

Quarters. Where they’re serving up L’America.

Cp. J.D. Morrison wasted the dawn,

Dipping spoons into the ferryman’s

Grotto. Those bright eyes and excesses surged

With voltage vanities that sent the desert

Into apoplexy. Now this leap-frog nation

Grows boys to build staircases

And exchange coffee talk like battery charges

On the front line, in stuttered

Corrosion; Ordered in abecedarian fashion.

AA, AAA, C, D.

A steel-stringed instrument is lifted carelessly

In what was my brother’s room

— a guillotine on the night before the revolution.

Its neck, silver, reminds of something collective, childhood,

shadowed by the cloth image atop a flagpole —

akin to that which dancers nakedly embrace 

for fear of faith and penetrate tired eye sockets

and memory of your music - that moves them, limb by limb.

A doctored algorithm always self-corrects,

Words said by a gutter professor over subway exhaust,

White Out whiplash & fatal blow pops churn

Entropic waves in coffee cups and partings,

To be cut with meridian magic,

Imitatio the invisible, tragic kingdom.

Octavius, thirteenth child & eighth son of George III,

A darling peach on the gilded tree,

Your clam-bellied lungs

Take the sea’s salary

To your knees.

How you came

To be an apparition

Like the albino girl on a bike at night, who

Passes the Öl Turm, gravel kicked into the

Orchard ditches, where fruitful suicide

Collects, turning sticky sweet

Like black-eyed predators cawing a child’s penny to the well mouth,

Where it falls to the god of gravity

and ends

in a wet

Amen.