Letdown


Blue
sky.
Shoo,
fly!

Sky:
"Bee,
fly
free."

Bee
drones
free
tones.

Drones,
shoo!
(Tones
blue.)





Once the Spelljack


Once the spelljack has finished dangling
from the stone bridge over the gulch
and the melons have gone to their rest
under the eaves of silence,
then by a chainlinked happenstance 
mercy’s piebald horse will come at last
to roost in the hammock which Great-aunt May, 
unbeholden to fashion's trammels, wove 
from burgeons of milkweed and sedge.  

Then will the melons awaken 
plump with succulent psalms to spirits 
nearer by far than any zeitgeist's
gaudy insinuations of urgency.
And mercy’s piebald horse will neither 
nicker nor neigh but will toss its quilted 
mane in yeses of velvet. 





Leave thy low-vaulted past


Caught between mirrors, the nautilus
preens to infinity – now admiring
the huddle of rusty quagga stripes
spoking its shell, now contemplating
its ninety tentacles and wishing
they weren’t so stubby. How much fun,
if they were long like a squid’s (being
so much more numerous), to twine them
into intricate shadow-plays – to replace
a dim dreaming life in sunless crypts
with the joy of creating – not just
fusty old mansions with their
idle doors and irised ceilings, but
(roly poly gammon and siphuncle)
collages with the hallmark: Naughty.





Perspective


The mountain sheep
winding his horn,
bounding from crag to crag,
pauses in mid-leap,
tries to imagine
the delegates at the UN
waving shoes
pounding with shoes
throwing shoes--
tries and fails,
rewinds his horn,
and dines upon yuccas and scree.



Once the Spelljack was originally published in Lucid Rythms; Leave thy low-vaulted past and Perspective were originally published in Disembodied.