My Blades of Fury
To all who oppose me, let this be a warning: if you even think to hurt me or anyone I love, you will meet my Blades of Fury. My blades blazing in the blood-red sun. My blades slicing the air into shrieks. My blades lifting from the smoke of ruin: these are my blades. Unlike other blades wiped clean in the grass, unlike those blades brooding in sheaths, my blades are full of remembrance, my blades do not sleep. My storm of blades from which green bolts unleash. Blades I swing, ringing the light around me. My blades forged from the depths of sadness, honed on the edge of madness: these are my blades. My blades singing in every blade at once. My blades stirring the winds of justice. My blades rising on a crest of wonder: These are my blades. And the echo of my blades is a slew of blades. These blades trembling in my warrior hands smell you in the dark. You think they need an excuse? Welcome to my blades blades blades.
Inflatable Sonnet
Inflatable pools, mannequins, bald eagles. What does summer know? Soon it will be so hot who needs to eat? My Old West Gang will call me El Profesor. I will wear a bandana of hate and moonlight. I have left Styrofoam leftover containers in fridges all over this city, particularly Bloomington Street. Eli has llamas. A racetrack rumbles in the distance like the Great Throats of Congress. My balding head is a satellite dish, just a little. Here is a carrot. Joke: I am pretending it is the Roaring Twenties mind if I crash here? My socks are painted on. I will grow a small beard and stand on my head for a while. Then I souped-up a tricycle, literally (that is, somehow involving soup). Taco is a verb.
Red and blue planets
What we’re drawn to is proof enough: these pills, other acts of disappearance. I wrote a song about a girl who swallowed the blue planets— Kevlar, Carbine, and O Beautiful Bomb, can you hear it? So perfectly haplessly cruel the world we have made. Let’s meet back here in 5 minutes, you say, you always say. I’ll bring the lite-brite. I’ll bring a half-moon, too pale to glitter, a tiny toy earth, a blue-fire marble, the hole in my heart like a white star burning. More and more, the rock-show sky. Venus rising is a glass wrecking ball, inside it red harbors, red sails, red winds.
Ordinary Greek
Oh, rainy day Olympus your sight is marred and so deeply betrothed to the ornamented spectacular. We have the holiday, we place animal in animal and then become more animal ourselves, consumptively. All that age has given me is a perspective roughly three feet above my former youth, with less to wonder on. Men wake, and are woken to an ocelot, an uncooked breakfast. We would like to go home now. We would prefer a slice of lightning.
Anecdote
for PM
A man is climbing palm trees, cutting down coconuts for everyone.
He puts a plastic straw in the top and lets you drink the milk,
which tastes warm, & the woman, she will not leave me to my own thoughts:
I want a coconut. I want a coconut.
I would be happy but I don’t have a coconut.
But I tell her, it’s too late, you’ll be awake with a bad stomach,
let’s go back to the hotel. Only she is saying, no. I want a coconut,
& now others have stopped walking to listen. I tell her, let’s go back
to the hotel, baby, then tomorrow before it’s too dark? Coconut. OK?
I have to lead her away with my hands. In the morning, it is not later
than seven, she puts her pretty tongue into each of my ears to wake me.
Well? What about my coconut.
& I am thinking, shall I kill her now?
Or give her a coconut first?
