Mars, Aries and Scorpio from the Wellcome Collection’s Persian Manuscript 373. Source: wellcomecollection.org
Gennevilliers
They got to know each other in Paris between two smoking faces which it was said were fired blanks. The machine guns launched black and yellow texts onto the café terraces. Ancestral huts and migraines crucified the gossiping sun of a late autumn in which convalescents were stretching out electrified limbs. One spoke adroitly about these rhymes bees of inconsistent blondeness. They weren’t listening or pretended not to hear. In their navel rooted the reign of a sphecoid wasp-star which itched throughout the discussion. They were anxious to go home however their legs had become the sole emblem of a museum of the nearby desert. They broke their ribs several times in the middle of the terrace. At a neighboring table the devil applied his makeup. At that very moment a tom-tom unleashed a drumbeat inside their stomachs and inexhaustible molecules. In their left lung Zodiac howled; and Time, whom one never meant to interrupt, plummeted incontinent and sat on their sentences, chewing them like birdshit. Time fled past the trashcans. Zodiac partied hard with long and bloody fireflies.
agonies
caves
menstruation
you corner me against the white wall of legends and against
the forced flight of the falcon whose beak accuses the saharan’s face
in the midst of a sheep stampede
the girls smelled porphyry exploding from our grottos
the rifle measured the cloud from the riot’s fires
and spat
the monstrous name of a chewed-up king
rust and sardines in this desert where prayer
is drinking
the cruel mouth itself
the drum of the sky yelled at every ensign
and the woman still damp with the complicit dawn
with apple trees and treasons
with gray cobras
with maroon business and bursts of woodchips split down
to the trunk
whistled in the strangeness of a throne made out of centipedes
The head of the other had spurted out of the africa on her back.
gentle the myth that spurs me
gentle this traffic of inextricable salts
and this Gale of evils and tongues
my mother never knew handles so rich
in whirlwinds of birds boring into my skin
softly this frozen head and these regurgitated salvos
in the rocky ditch of my life
of my hand tangible and gentle this present century
the straightforward concupiscence of roses and the abyss
in which is scrubbing itself clean
this unfinished people
The voice had attracted gawkers who stood like scorpions ready to strike. But they weren’t even watching. They were whipping the cats of delirium. We had dug them a nice grave inside their solemn mucus in which the unerased and not at all affected devil pissed after his protoplasmic orgies. We went door to door. Everyone had the right to one blow of the truncheon. We decreed a cold war ramadan. Salvation went all the way to God the Innumerable thrown into the dusty attic like so many planks and bent nails. We taxed them like spell-casters. They hadn’t yanked on the king’s tail. We blurred them. They were born again from their bitumen. We barbarized them. But they civilized the incantations and carried high the carcass of the manitous of unincorporated factories and stations. We tried to fool them. They didn’t have a coach to rent. We arranged them one behind the other like pouting children. They leapt at the throats of precepts and silenced them. Elsewhere, we tied very tight ties. We waited for the true billboard to finish bagging heaven. Money slit throats in the slums. We confirmed the customs fee was not a toll. We puffed up, scattered brains, ratfinked and clinked drinks. We were blue-yellow-green.
gentle
this vulgar science
gentle for the couscous of your thunder
which vomits in future entrails
gentle this lagoon
gentle parrot
stud farm of renewed sales and paling jaundice
end ending the obstacles
and the abased order of skewed legends
finishes off your ink of roses
The convoy of delirium went farther. We saw shell casings in the brook. What puddle below me?
I am this lair and not your uvula
swayed by the involuntary shudders of coitus
and spare change
here’s an asphyxia doubled by sulfuric asthma
and your audience
broken if not crisscrossed
by sluices and debits
The Headquarters was erected in the middle of the slog. A peacock protested this ravenous war. We say LAUGH.
from a grimace
from a flint
from a fire in which your dreams are parapoems
from a prowler
from an acolyte
and from complication over everything
comes the silence in your urns
from a trumpet
arranged in the mad window
and how not to truncate these geometries
I unchain them
from an epileptic
saint
scissors
we want a blank screen
we want a tree beyond ourselves
this season shucks itself and finds our true faces again
and your soapwort heads
vomit-covered muzzles
oh our pricetagged heads our necks without axis
our poppies by these meadows of children
and this rare perverted sweating mosque
the calamitous cricket of curare africas
from a simple game of echoes rising again and billowing
when you detach the iguana’s rings
from an afternoon turned toward the moons
of a clairvoyant disorder
of a fig
by this Congo cheated of lymphic stars
of mistaken knocks
of a neverending anguish
we watch you in the irises of an ill laugh
but here are some zigzags a nubile sorcery
king
my gallows nocturne
boo king by the staircase of absence and Evil
and your laughable nettles
which the cyclone of my songbird eyes
that doesn’t fear the snares in yours
will soon hurl over the hedges of vice
Scorpionic Sun appeared with Cleveland State University Poetry Center last month
