with manacle
and halo
your brush pinks
my skin
you've been captive
long
my ghostly
tone
for ivory
stardust
incidentally taken
rebirth
is precisely
inevitable.
mine has an underbelly
not the soft sort
a mollycoddled whore
might have
itself
an elevated post
deemed bestowed with fortune—
demanding much fawning
and fanfare
[akin to stardom there
where leisure is two winks
or a nod.
lavished with three squares
a tin shack
adorned by a single, red lamp
lit bloodshot, outside
every... single... night
a straw-bed inside to sleep on
after each routine, providential fuck
most of all for the few bucks
which she may tuck away
for a week's rent; that at month's end
she sends something home
is considered
luck]
mine
is scaled & rough
coarser still
like crocodile skin—
hide, which in and of itself
a curiosity
suitable for tanning;
a harvest from an ancient beast
splayed and skinned in an industrial line
on that scale
[slaughtered
closer to where it was grown
en-mass, on farms
run by firms flaunting logos
of tamarind trees
and palms]
guts and gore
tossed into the river
herself
grateful for that paltry bounty
for when the torrential floods arrive
she knows
she will churn it all
and cataract
[mixing-in the rest of the decay
along with red, volcanic mud
that she will carry the whole rotting lot
in torrents and froth
whitewater
careening down sheer facades
as she descends plateaus— furiously
ploughing at the fork]
engorging the entire watershed; it is her—
her gushing has always quenched a content;
despondent — ululates
for she knows the rains
which swell-up her veins like adders, are still
four, damned months hence
that from her perch, at a distance,
she can clearly see Alexandria
burning.
poets lie in degrees
especially when found
to be prostrate. couched,
for instance: davenport
transforms into sleeper,
may be guile, maybe fable,
accordingly furnished.
now let me tell you
a spotty, little story:
.......................
.......................
.......................
.................period
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