The payoff for languid harmonics
is commitment resistant, octagonal,
slightly intrepid.
Your arms dangle like slighted popsicles
soaking the sun.
Are you a jilted animal,
a catty-clowned hip man,
all bones and rheumatoid marsupials?
Ovid’s remorse isn’t blooming by your
bicycle heart, nor his rose garden, dear Reaganite.
Your heart-shaped kitchen is rigid
and full of policy refinement tactics.
Your loose foot is a municipal hearing.
No slick-rendered glissando or erected foot
belongs in your mouth.
This raging propaganda doth not glow lightly
in your ass, not for months at least,
not until it lights a communal rig and blows it
into concussion mode.
May some fowl-guised crescendos bruise your bowel-sake!
Rouse a rowdy kitchen confidential!
Pay my genius tuition in a friendly way.
This addendum isn’t trying to be luck, no—
It reeks of hermitage, of a better vein
than a kitten trying to be a daisy.
* * *
The kitten was trained from day one
to be a lake of soft harmonics, to be
the rendered thing, a drawing, wealthy, a floral cud
of nerves seeping, the bureaucracy of spirit cuddled
in the smallest presidential cabinet, tucked away
by the kitchens of the welfare state, where dragons
with stone hips clown-car into Ovid's mouths
who sing like Orpheus if he could’ve written a single note,
and there’s Nefertiti, long-breasted in the neighboring squall,
covered with scratches, Reagan hurling the heart-shaped gastronomy
of food-stamps and children to-be-had. And if my arms
are popsicle sticks, let my poem be the joke, or pun the mouth
of indigo teeth blaring funtimes at the sun unlocks, the spanish beach
we pass away to once injustice jaws its melt on muses 1-thru-9,
turns their hair into a laser-print memorial on a strip of balsa,
the land where the taxidermied rheumatoid marsupial
will put on his glasses and his one sunflower shoe, read
the Wall Street Journal, be upset by the stock options
of this peculiar economic company, and stuff himself
with the leftover gnocchi, the windowed light like a meme.
In short, alas, we are doubly taut and pulled
towards each lesson. We have not
done nothing yet, really, and I mean that
in the positive sense, the propaganda of every
loving double-entendre, each bicycled double-negative.