53.
A
In the savage rhythm of dèsprised love,
This implement, that one Elizabeth
So pure could dip and lift the water up
And carry it spilling nothing,
Sits with bits of macaroni worming through,
Escaping; now gets its rim slammed into the sinkedge
In chop-patterns of overnuptial
Pangs—drips, bangs / clips the
Object of your hate and fear slams slant
Against the pans and now forever curled (for safety)
Filed wedges in solipsistic cuneiform,
Pure pain, language to be read, decoded
By scholars of pain, by the studied and learned
Of the damned, the involute and death-marked,
Hallmarked from the Plains of the Id,
Earmarked for the juiceflow of electric anger
Direct Gridcurrent, that used to quell condemned
Men and Women who go wrong and are judged terrestrially,
All passed along in code, arcane and jig-patterned
Enigma-wrapped, and handed by hand
From one clay temple god down to the next.
B
Thrum upon the sink, the sinkhole near the facebowl,
Unutterable displeasure peels a wen around the warming
Glow of rage unravished by the wing
Of prudence. How many holes have now been shot
In me? A foolish febrile conga of crowd-hypnosis
Pierced by hibijibis, perforated laterally
down the brainpan; and only useful now
To catch the glutted moil of tears
That cling (by surface tension). Each meniscus
Swells, a bezeled lens reflecting one sad
Drop overreplicated in a pale sidereal whirl. A bowl
As real as the bowl of heaven,
Hammered, repoussé around the zinc lip,
Starpatterned, Shakerquilt-clever in design,
With slow recursions, involute, embrowning,
Making the unintelligible less vocal, the
Airless a grayer vacuum, simple fear a primal terror,
Turning inward mightily, waking every woodcut
Witch and wizened Torquemata
Out of faeryland to live among us
Endless twisting of all the ropes, Prayer-
Wheels of the damned, mandalas pierced to perforation by the
Shots of expectation slit against the stones.
Your eyes get blacker, Kitchenbasilisk.
