NEW WORKS BY MARK SARGENT
our man in the mediterranean

FUNGUS IS THE BRAIN OF NATURE
 
Vitaly has bitten many cats on the ear.
He claims it’s extremely painful,
for the cat, but that this feline suffering
is the path to peaceful coexistence.
 
Pain gets the chemicals cooking
synapse mold mutate flash
streamlined, fuck, it’s sautéed,
scalded blasts freight-training
a frantically illuminated question:
Do I submit or
do I try and tear his face off?
But, he bites.  Weird.
 
V says, “You must make them a toy,
ya, and dis toy will eclipse all others.”
He takes a plastic bag and a rubber band
and by wrapping and suturing the ends
constructs a tampon.
He tosses it to the floor.
Ali, natch, loves his tampon
and merrily chases it
across the tiles.
 
“Then they won’t fuck with the chess pieces.”
 
The loaves are ready, pulled and filling the room
with the evidence of the miracle of yeast.
We don’t share any with the cats.
 
27 November 2014


A NEW NARRATIVE
 
I think I’d like to fully invent
my past, enough of the old story.
Maybe, lemme see, a prisoner of conscience
for umm two years in a…  okay, maybe not,
I suppose I want to cast myself hero
when I am so not.
 
I am of the conviction
that there will be enough suffering,
you needn’t court it.
And the work, as Allen said,
is to ease the pain of living.
 
“nakedness is bad for business”
 
Tis a posthumous thing, all claims at inventiveness,
the past is there for blame, for tag attachment and balloons
of Yeti urine dropped from the beaks of compromised raptors,
low burn residue flaking.
 
Just ‘round the corner are some Igoumenitsa girls
just dying to meet you, some still dressed in their native garb:
Kurdistani, Alawite, Pashtun, Bengali
and they will do all sorts of things to you on the ferry over
to Ancona.  All you gotta do is shove them in the trunk,
keep yr mouth shut, get deeper into Europe, and let them out.
The stuff they carry, don’t worry about it.
 
Yet the claim is the only thing that counts, the thing itself
has nothing to say.  The thing itself has nothing to say.
Blustering across time naming and claiming stuff is sure
fire and foot—that isn’t ice but a lens a mile thick curved
over an eyeball the size of Mars.  Oceanic tears drop.
 
30 December 2014