V.

[Note: This poem was cannibalized for the climax of How to Summon an Angel. I suggest reading that book first. In comparison, the following verses are only a curiosity.]

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V.

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Squiggling muddy thistles defray the cost of the wind,
yet I’ve strayed too far with clock ticks wriggling chubby on my blood,
rubbing off lunar perfumes and thin sick steam of condensed meaning,
chopping with chin-machete through the sore neon forest of seeming,
I’m the warrior I paid to be oh mother I just wanna be good,
have I waged the war I should?

So I jink and quirk and think above this murky green sink,
this lurid emerald stink the shade of poison and of life,
foul waves broaden and the moistened autumn sun speaks,
it’s twilight at noon while Opa gnarls into the family tree,
jowly snarling growly and receding by stages into his face,
that blasted casket for his memories, oh why do I crave sleep?
Father, I was there when I was written, I’ve read the ledgers
and I was restless haggard smitten eager to please and a raging edgehammer,
just a festive ragged flaming prayer butchered on the malted altar of my age;
like God I didn’t believe in anyone else, like Satan I didn’t believe in myself;
now I perceive I be but twin helices baking in the stern furnace of time,
as the years rhyme into a net, under a golem inscribed with the solemn sign:
once upon a mind I made it to the blessèd city and married the fairy princess,
but I fought her bitterly to the split ends of her haunted gothic forest of hair,
till the o.g. city, with its spires and mares, shriveled into a thing to run from,
till receding trees played squashy blue bars on the algal piano of this canal…
and yes yes I know this sloshy old quaquaversal song’s long been rotten,
but this rot wriggles with the teeming reek of fecund reproduction,
for a swamp is a romp is a foaming symbol of regeneration.

For years I had that frozen pink apocalyptic war-torn fear
where the sky is a tomb for the bomb of the moon;
there was a hole here—it was born in my hands;
I’d show you but no it wouldn’t be any use,
I’d need more strands to expose my alchemy:
say, the sea-coast calamity, the reciprocating human salami,
& the gull glittering into eternity, the echo that crescendoed,
the mechanical sunlight walking its dry fingers to my home,
the egret of regret lingering in a jungle of hieroglyphic graffiti,
the clouds blooming consecutive and interconnected and orchestral,
triangles spinning clockwise in circles whirling counterclockwise,
the bedsheet blown back like a spiraled page of waves,
the triple-blossomed heraldic unity of the emblem,
the conflagrated car, the number-charmed rag-czar,
the fragments of biblical pottery flung on my shore,
the ice ape with my child face,
the spider with no sound more,
and the holy wholenessless I wound round my oar
to thread the molded mind maze of old King Clown.

But yesterdusk I warmed my hands at a woman’s bonfire:
brown sunbursts in her orbitals—I looked behind her eyes,
I went to her center and squinted out from her ribs
and watched her sashay away with dustlight on her lids
after a musk night’s choreography of two sleeping bodies,
after the starling in her arm perched all eve and warbled cuckoo
in mute color in the churchly halfdark of my black-curtained room,
for the second time I understood tattoos. Her lashes fluttered away
and landed on a branch in the wallpaper over my shuddery fridge,
snug clouds from my metal kettle climbed the crow hill of the sky,
while on my windowsill she yawned and swung portico thighs,
& the dawn rose over her belly, & the cry of birds in her spine,
her back a star-flecked morning, her bra a rusted rail bridge,
I gusted ‘cross her country, I scaled her speckled beach ridge
as she sighed. O Lord she was a peachful of light.

And now on this noon golden as a passage to the afterlife
I stroll corridors roofed with sky, clutching the old motley frock
that provides the livery of my lovely unlivelihood,
and I don’t have much lock or key, am not winged or immortal
and have never seen a rhyme ruin a cathedral—
but where the sunshine touches me and sings
I turn human animal. At a puddle
I reach down and meet my fingers.
A world falls.