Avert your eyes and do not ponder when
the life you live has crowned you fool again.
Cheese hanging from the lips of Calliope,
bra-straps of beans, creamy yolk songs
that are not scrolls but pinions for weak
black land. Puff up your chest, son!
Raids affect the flavored boughs, yew above
chicory, honey saffron, needing cows
to hide between the hills where hothouses
are built and fans vaporize coolness.
Along a rabbit’s colony the habit hangs, to make
a scrap of a tunnel mode, to sing the briefcase
when it hangs too low, secure some palace
where wings taint an apple dark. Hold us dear,
asking for no blankets, quorum or shalom,
mouth harps in the tightening loam of lore.
(Pallor Kedge staked out his finished tooth masterpiece
and it stayed under the bridge, Gallacks Hogunt
stapled all his papers with an elk horn at the station.)
Just a fear of swings with chains, not ropes,
and the nodding cross worshippers at the lake,
to sing when we were afraid seems the adamant
of praise for drunken scrolls, alas runts, alas hated,
alas prefigured when time had no chinks and grooves.
Volumes on the subject? There was at least one:
Dallas Barton wrote medicinal acrimony second to none,
Zap Womp Dogo Chags, ripping the face out of punk rock.
A wannabe Limey slob tore his Waynesville
apartment to shreds…strobe-night edges of police cruisers,
and at 16 through the EverClear he stood, a frowning
scarecrow, unwilling to permit a blot on his gizmo.
I have the encyclopedias, he said, you must wash
at my window, you fucks. Skateboard grazing
never bought anybody time for shepherding
a new row of theory. Quaking to be right,
Appalachia had discovered how to run
a Xerox thresher. Sheaves! Reams!
It was the hour of cassettes in resin hands.
Stondee Palgraps, The Kedge
