20.
O these days of beauty are indeed stilled
Bitter dawns and sad, hollow evens
Oddly throw their lots.
My hair stands up
My eyes fill with black water
My fingers jill
My knees jack
Needles sarabande across my back
My senses fail me—I fill in the blanks
With clever rhymes & colloped pranks.
21.
Life forms, the cube drops and the bailff calls.
My flesh chips with the shrapnel of my
Soul. My image bleeds like the dollbaby
Of Christ as a kid in ruby velvet and gold
Bleeding from heart and hands on all my grammas dressers
One wrapped in yellow cellophane to keep
The air and the corruption of age
From maculating the plaster palms
From smirching the pious droplets
Accounting for so much stainless contemplation.
22.
My spirit's surgical steel wrappings slip, and
The ache that I may not make part of my daily dialogue
Lies dried on the heels of the hands of this Kewpie Jesus
With the sweet face and his cardiothoracic system burst through
The infant chest, just as anxiety
Drills mine, and sits like a crescent moon
A vaudeville prop, propped tips up
Cheesing me, cheapening my life on this Earth,
Why when He (and here as a little he) suffered so much
Must my endless twist of life's strappado mean so little?
23.
And now the torpor of our lives
Accumulated totems of cold reversals and
Hyæna angels laughing in their endless ranks
Turns on everyone who touches me,
The rose of heaven spins
And all the cool celestial thorns whip out centrifugally
A fugue in ten thousand voices
Like a rattle of Souvenir spoons in their special rack.
I am odd man out in all God's mixes:
I am fresh out of idée fixes.
