On the margins of these carnivals,
it's getting pretty carnal. This body,
god's body, has been in this alley since
h/e died. Today is what I am talking
about. This weird time, this feared
grime, this unclean, unsought poverty,
in which some rich have become the
liches of the ditches, haunting the body
politic with ticks and ticks. The clock's
hands have gone disconnected fingers.
It pays to linger: you get to see the world
freed from the one great squirrel. Now
the nuts are hidden and cracked open,
not likely to make tree. The celebrations
are ignorant, by least necessity. Consumption
focuses on the shelf-lived, now-dead items
whose polyester polyglot clotted the tubes
of our internecine constriction. Flow has
slowed. I know this show. All the world's
aflame and we are but brayers. Our speech
manufactures our context and there is not
even a specific extinction awaiting us. We
have become unbecoming. Our unbecoming
will slowly grow mushrooms. There's a reason
everyone is clamoring to eat them. Get used to
no butter or lemon to help this fungus medicine
go down. Set and setting are both upsetting the
former cart. Before, there was the simple good,
the sweet evil, and the all tighty dollar. Now we
are lucky to have a little meet, a dollop of wood,
or, even more rarely, a mighty collar. Restraint
has morphed: it is like a down pillow sans case
or cover. The feathers obey only stochastic winds,
and there are fires burning on these breezes. So
even these so-called-individual feathers cannot
hope to weather this norm-less place. Now that
all is one place, we can expand what was done for us
a hundred and fifty years ago: the world is dead!
We have killed her. Our final romps will smell
like decomposition, even as we compose the
dirges for our hysteretic urges. Anthropo-
obscene. Preen a little, even at the geriatric
minutes that remain. Time will watch, imp
assive. Take that band off your wrist, there is
no need to hear the clicking of the seconds.
The heart slows down and must be measured
in eons as these common eras erode and become
uncommon slime. Rhyme may be all that is left,
and space is, as it has always been, on the right.
What is barbed wire when its fence posts have
conflagrated? A ten dollar word on top of tetanus,
unshot trespassers. We have failed to forgive
those who trespassed against us. No surprises
on this birthday. Something was born today,
as is always true on a dead log. Green shoots
are the only shots you will hear. Not boots.
The coots have places to go yet. There will
be bodies. Of water. Mostly water. The
daughters of the earth will inherit moon
gravity, blue depravity, a goon's concavity,
curving toward the subject and making
spherical cause with the convex object.
Objections! Should have raised them before
everything was lowered. Now is the time for
short lines and impish verbs. Isness will build
a fortress out of pompous porous promiscuity.
Molecules have always gotten it; they were a
model, a myth. Humans did not get the massage;
the hands they laid were always too harsh to
read between the spines.
Roman Ryan 