Sunday, October 09, 2005

Hickory Dickery

Church Mouse's Observations
On Sex and the Mythic Suburb
When He Was Just Fifteen
.
Loved boy, demon dreaming, run through
an emasculating mill of hours,
boards piled up, planked, trafficked in 4²
religion, waiting on a driving nail
with brambles in his hair, roots turned
from will to function, a piercing on
a civil lathe, dizzying cries out
of dark wood to a foolish track of
silence, a polis of quiescent vows,
sawdust, at last desired, somewhere,
in some way, as someone, someday,
a last tryst with light,
Persephone dragged down to the dark
of an accustomed compromise,
Lethe's tidal give and take

hard to remember what the world was
before she alighted like the moon,
like a dark screen, lit by the sun
ever riding at her heel, the lustrum
of her back meteorotically always
just beyond, beyond the sun and the crater
she cleaved in loved boy's yard now gone to
seed, overgrown like a jungle where
cats roam about the face of a fallen
buddha; lovingly they pad the earth
in carpets of peaceful invention;
loved boy throws rocks at the sun,
sun turns to a river where loved boy
drinks, memory blanked by her sweet
elixir, one sip and forever gone
desert emerges in the bed
where loved boy swam, wild rapids
turned to sand, gleeful accelerations
between silted banks of refusal,
waters robbed of holy wars, baptism
of thistle, purged eddies of loveless nights
where fish that try to spawn go belly up,
rich effulgence stripped, putrefied,
dried bone cast in the heat of shoal
and sand where statuary crumbles,
toppled totem in a dying forest,
illusion lamented, a longing
cleansed, hot wind glides along, her name
rustles leaves, a creeping fire, fissure
rubbled pyre panging for her touch
he straddles the ghost of a future promise
ridden out of fitful sleeplessness;
dreams, like shells, litter a blanket
in a solitary field, a boy
understands an upturned nose smells fear,
he's outsourced to an ignorant safety
of distance and memory that divides,
conquers, like a book fallen on its side,
a museum shelf's glass-housing, a scream
and a shard of nail beneath, listing among
days that do not know his name, loved boy
totters like a calf, like a plunger in
the trunk of her father's car, his ghost
flush against the back of the sky
where night picks away at an ancient hole
cherchez la femme, loved boy
of a motherless house and a
spattering of maypoles, suburban
sex and all still moments in between,
letting go and freezing in a
mid-day and cautionary sequence
of return, eruptions of bread and seed,
a(r)morless armies and a drink
expel a constant howling, it's a drink
he can't afford, he turns onto his side,
heart tympanic in his ear, memory
of taste, saliva on a wooden tongue,
though he was of the earth he was
of the earth too late, stopped
creating, quit weilding language skyward
gods tortured him with lovers,
his mind a constant hum, thoughts mere
impositions, broken apart,
one got away as the other
was being eaten, he remembers
her like snow not far from an ocean
and he feels like a fat man leaning
over a countertop, a glass jar
fired without love wedged into
memory; she likes to describe being
ravaged to her friends, there are boys
she will not name, and one, like wine
sharpened on the tongue, metal on a strap
in a house where love went bad, a midnight
meeting of regrettable constancies.

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