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Sooner or later,
for want of subject,
we write our workbench,
word litter and palm grease
violently pounded into slick
burnished leather piles,
dead cell flake, glitterfall
like dandruff over sequined
feet in vocatives for tool chop,
thin smears of old menstrual
blood from soft young girls
under starched spring songs
as we pony up to bar rails;
homo erectus making do
with whatever's at hand,
as bricoleur, steel est verbum.
En camera, old paper tears run
down cracked porcelain masks
onto faded bolts of skycloth,
sagging stars attached, sestinas
in puddles of prepositional clot
awash in pools of diphthong oil,
jars of fetal nouns lining shelves,
staring into blank verse staring back
from slats of verb-spattered walls.
Homo habilis at Lascaux tosses
own brittle bones onto midden heap
of rehashed antelope and anvil scrap.
On some day, in any given text,
a rusted shovel might happen,
might slice into tarred laminates
of night-soil memory; penetrate deep
into layers of phrase-st(r)uck vanity,
clank on the moldboard of a buried plow
just beyond the word-tarred wall,
find weed stalks hiding ovarian buckets
of breeding mosquitoes on the whine,
neglected bird calls, pine song's child
filling lungs with fistfuls of root stock,
cracking ancestral tombs, letting sound
ring with the hammer of the tone-deaf
stonecutter violating the silence again.
© 1997 red slider. All rights reserved.
(first publication, September '98 issue of Recursive Angel )
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