my unsung teeth

my unsung teeth

ripple

like young titty-meat

pocketed

twixt hairy fingers.

snail

to want to wait, bolts thud

back, ab ovo, begin again,

nested in a blackberry’s

latched drupelets sleeps  

the patient pearl

purple-black bathed, ticking

with dreams of slugdom  

jams gandolfini

navel belched lint

skanky as in: melba toast, marmite,

blackmail, young Howard Stern, Sydney Pollack,

 

I can see the anger in your eyes,

without chemicals, he points.

this isn’t a watch And that’s

not the time you put into it

 

time of a different sort:

not made for watches

 

I find malls compelling,

but they give me a crick in the neck

a cervical disorder similar to:

wet hair in cold daylight, full stomach in the shallow end,

spray cheese. these have no skank.

 

they’re honest and well-intentioned

they say <<the road to hell is paved with good intentions>>

I say <<heck, I got a match, your ass and my face or is it…?>>

“hey got a match?”

“smoke cigarettes?”

“love ‘em?”

“hate ‘em?”

“Sometimes.”

Dot Dot Dot

“iuhno...you tell me.”

Same blank as in gap, mind it,

Go to Italy, lift weights, watch a movie,

All a distraction before ya die

 

we distruct

Harvest Moon!

Friendship thrives beneath the harvest moon!
Where no one does not love sweet wine!
They pity those who are not concerned
To revel for revelry's sake, and laugh at those
Who sit and think and thumb their nose
And open and shut and open big books
And sneeze at the doing of it.

For no one does not love what he loves to do
But that he sits and reads because he feels he should
At the right time but drinks at the wrong moment,
And though his parts disband some, his muscles unclasp their fellows,
Though he forgets his arms, legs, and curious shoulders:
He does not lose himself, He does not love wine,
He sees a moon, and sees it laugh, and does not know
That it laughs at him, or, if he does, does not know,
It laughs at all like him, not him alone.

So please, in the meantime,
Drink and Dance!
Without a thought of these words
And that man.

He's nowhere to be found
And the moon, unseen,
Still cackles.

For My Friend

I never noticed his knuckles

But then it seemed any of the ruddy indices

Of his body might have given me a clue, as if there were clues to be found

And he was composed of them solely, though one, among the others

Which had had him hold on, gave out,

Where I thought to moor

The first attitude of that early afternoon.

The past perfect and the present perfect compounded:

“he’s always been…,” and I’d thought, “no, he had always been”,

But the words stuck in my throat.

Now, as then, when one point in time lobs itself forward,

And you fail to admire the colors left in its wake,

The parabola is all too clear, its bent too definite,

Its trajectory too perfected.

He was Iscoceles with two obtuse angles,

Or the palimpsest, whose faded scrawl vies with the all too decipherable:

Of the two we read what appears to be read, what was written lately,

What is spaced generously on the blistering parchment.

Help us to read again and to right the angles

But also to love the hidden, the disjointed, that most felt,

Most sweet, most joyful, most gentle,

Handsome and quiet young man who often held his gaze

To the ground while in his head he cupped the silt of genius.

I imagine his knuckles were imperfect and I ask not which or why,

The conceit has run its course.

Concerning Folsey: Kitchen Sprite

Argument: How a young man of Visigoth extraction resorts to murder; with what instrument the murder was committed; the object(s) of his machinations; in what manner his agenbite of inwit makes itself felt in the presence of dowager during tea.

I (EXT. Graveyard, Folsey’s funeral. Pastor Erikson reads Folsey’s eulogy. Everyone cries.)

Pastor Erikson: Pilfering bristles, wriggling joy, flitting blithely from table top to counter…

Folsey the filcher -- A fornight dead.

Mrs. Porphyry: They found him slumped over a water chestnut.

Mrs. Wellbeloved: They say he did it with a toe-nail paring.

Colonel Wubbels: Found it under the couch. Seems someone had left it there.

Darcy Gracchus: Had a ‘Gothic’ aspect to it…at least…that’s what I overheard the detective say.

Assembled (wailing): Too much, too soon! Too much, too soon!

A toothless, blubbering woman gums the Pastor’s cassock.

The men shred their hats.

Pastor Erikson: He had no children, no biological family to speak of. He was survived by but a single unbutton…

The toothless woman savors the taste of her tears.

Pastor Erikson (voice quavering): And his memory trickles like Celestial torture, or, at times, lingers for a spell, and then, dissolves…Like the quiet, vacant labor of our lives…

Hat in hand, unshredded, Theo the Visigoth squirms in his chair.

Pastor Erikson: Gentlemen in our lonely hamlet will be devastated by the sight of an even number of toothpicks on the mantel…Ladies will suffer tacitly in their boudoirs upon discovering their thimbles are void of tickles...And children will have clean teeth for a very, very long time.

Unknown woman: What’s he on about? The bit about the ladies?

The Epitaph Reads: We once found a thimble. It contained a doll fart. Its holes were stoppered by we know not what.

II (INT. Theo’s Kitchen, nighttime.)

In a swamp of rancid Hamburger Helper, his hand soapily circulates, the mind folding and unfolding the scamp's likeness soapily, soapily. And nothing, not nothing, nor not-nothing will smooth the furrows of memory, nor explain its mystery, as all explaining is, to wit, explaining away, and after nothing occurs, not nothing will prise it from the glistening, crispate limbs of Time hurtling naked into nothing.

Why had he done it? Soapy handily circulates.

The lucre…The filthy, filthy lucre.

A Cistercian reliquary containing the following: the ponderous grape Good-N-Plenty (the onliest of its kind), the jawbone of Girolamo; the foreskin of the Kritios Boy; the eyebrow-comb of Ulysses, Baelo Claudian garum with the 7 apocryphal Lucky Charms’s marshmallows: beige tapeworms, scarlet Cartouches, burgundy miscarriages, mauve plankton, and three of Martin Scorcese’s five wives in alternating shades of teal, orange, and blue; Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite’s 14 limited edition Pogs depicting Ammonius Saccas, Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, Julian the Apostate wearing a Yarmukle, Simplicius, and Gemistus Pletho; a gazillion bristles, and a bitten spud.

No more ketchup soup, no more dirty dishes.

III (Midday, Lady Lemonpeel’s drawing room.)

Lady Lemonpeel: Nother cuppa'?

The Dowager Lady Grapeskin: Why certainly.

Leif (fresh from pagan lands): “Half…no three quarters naked…shit in their hair…fucking brown and sweating…I got the fuck out of there ASAP.”

Several images of young, well-knit, bronzed savages flicker in Theo’s mind.

Theo fidgets in his chair, convinces himself his temple itches, scratches his temple, thinks the walrus on Leif’s helmet is stupid, thinks he’s stupid and pompous, feels hot, then cold, then hot again, deploys a smile regarding no one.

He hardly knew the little guy.

Smegma

That one is a smegma. He’d jell beneath any fold of flesh that would have him. Umbilical, he’s snug in any crevice: stringy, white, and wet, curdled with a wide smiling.