10.04.2017

like a Balinese cock-fight



FRISCO CROSSROAD

Poets’ business, like a ring
round a Bali cock-fight –
goodbye to all that.
Shake your kaleidoscope thing,

ping your kalimba – your bricolage
a grubby grab-bag
(seven pounds of brag
& rage, mixed up with garbage).

Meanwhile that flesh-tone bridge
(crossing my Mississippi
song-&-dance) will be
morphing some spider’s double-edge

Venn diagram – a stick figure
at hobo train junction
where sunny Everyman
remembers split Coatlicue.

Rumors of an impasse, whispered
through a chain-link fence.
Barbed lozenge of insistence
scarring Rome, Jerusalem... the word

made fishy (west of Galilee,
east of Athens, Georgia)
as a picnic smorgasbord
laid out beneath barren oak tree.

That smell gets into everything.
Like something baked
a week in a canal – like
messy string theories, untangling

                  *

a knotty plot of pots & pans, banging
the human family
to kingdom come (really?)
from seedy tribes to Nero’s hanging

gardens.  Shady Rome, where every
cosmic veil is torn –
& a black rock is borne
upon recalcitrant shoulders of slavery

into the center of a black hole’s
starry honeycomb.
What ass bears the whole
sum?  What shoe of prophet’s mule?

Maybe an offshoot of Coatlicue
wearing a flimsy linen
Joseph-coat.  A woman,
patient Pietà... La Pia, Psyche...

Ariadne or Arachne, raveling
path P... that rugged,
ragged Francine – plugged
at Frisco crossroad – traveling

freight.  Sometimes you meet a person
heavier than time & space.
Rough wind carves well-faces
lined with laughter, hope... pain...

She steps forth from black stone –
stirring bears in her arms,
palming clay amid storms
of adamant love (makar-maid, shown).

10.4.17

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