PERMEATION

stunned pieces of previous places

splashed over us and purred

like a lion with antelope

gurgling in its guts, or leopard

a blood glut chant exhaled

into her with her cigarette,

vision vapor, a kiss

in all her dark corners.

quoth she, and I knew that

Creeley had already come

and gone―

need was now,

the body had a plan and

the heart was in the body

and the sound of it

tinged deeply, saturate

to love’s dew point.  

I am you as you are anything

 and obey the rationale of cheap sodas in the morgues of Pittsburgh,

warm as roses kept in sardine tins, my mother’s backyard Polish

over lines of laundry and steel soot, everything heavier than it looked,

crack of cloud, seam of caramel splitting the blue collar dream into

unequal parts, we will wear our poet children as epaulets of honor and

genetic disturbance; from a great height the urine falls and has been falling

since several hours before we crawled from the muck, the golden rain,

the trickle-down nectar, power lines dissecting the gray, scoring portions of sky

for the atmosphere barons of the future, the smell of your father’s underwear

in the cellar you unhitch your parachute and swim half as far as expected not even

a fucking merit badge not even one peck on the ass no you’re just handed a helmet

and told to be STORK TWO or TOO or II what the fuck does breakdown mean any

way?  Whitemen coming down the gangplank with the entrails of the crew draped

over their necks, fabulous cleavers for hands, spot-on memory dwarves peeking out of

their ever-so-pink ears and dog-hair clouds scudding over the contracting docks with

shooting gallery monotony— after he falls new legs exit from his armpits and he

applies himself to the grater, wee flakes of him falling like pastoral Pasternak on

crystal meth bent over the horse of Ataturk,  the beast snorts, stirs dirt with hoof,

pretends it knows the Pennsylvanian trot and shits without thought. 

It’s all airborne briefly.  Unison leaps help the planet spin.  Weight reduction,

picayune thrill, one tomato with the entire works of Stanislav Lubealot carved into

the skin.  We’re all related.  

20 September 2012