Major Funding for Despair
Resume nasturtiums, obeisance
toward arcane goodness consumed
as wafers in catacombs, historical
churches breeding grounds
for the exogamous headaches gods
abandoned in a last experiment
at human experience, its nodes
and modules careless as bones
on the scruff or surf where
waves are beached and whales
immunized against the contraflow
that traffics in regional market
strategies, humus before the fall,
evil emblem of national indebtedness
to virulence and the hymns that
semi-automatics make, honorably
discharged from a service that
turns ransom to candy, indigenous
slights handed out like tissues
at Shinjuku station or beside
the faithful dog that has his day
in bronze, girls in pigtails
initiated into the occult cult
of friendship. Finders sweepers;
to the early bird goes the trumpet
or was it a sax that so reworded
us in our hankering for beauty
and truth both, scrap metal sold
at pennies a pound, a '55 Chevy
your urn of choice, time stalled
at intersections where enigmas
fail to start, car talk like god
talk interrupted by a static hum
of excess, metaphors flat as soda
cans beside the parapets or pedo-
philes, students voted least
likely to accede to social graces,
consumers of our demand for shock,
as if the electric surge were
evidence enough our blood burned
inside us, burrowing out corridors
of tissue and bone like beneficent
spiders casting nooses over corners
where murder is an art and honesty
admonition. Less crime leads strangely
to a greater fear of randomness,
time's dishonest caravan whose
linguistic ineptitude indicates
moral decline like verb strapped
in a 19th century German drama
but waiting out onto the plain
speech of Kansas, abrupt likeness
of the middleman who captures
the White House only to release it
from its synecdochic bondage.
Liberation theology it isn't,
this misanthropic tea party
where sentences are set for
realignment like stars or wheels,
celestial mechanics inspecting
the bent axle of our devolution.
Page(s) 27-28
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The