POEM FOR EARTH DAY

THE lion will eat you:

but not until you get to hell

whatever type of hell,

it doesn’t matter which

since all of them drain

at last into the selfsame ditch

and anyway each
will have been renamed.

Do you smell the rain on this stern warm wind?

It is a message. Let no one ignore it.

Leaves, even new ones, fly sideways before it.

Get your shit together!

That wind is merely the borders

of an interpenetrating planet

that now arrives.

Classes are cancelled

church is cancelled

all contracts are void

The Assyrian lion whose teeth

are points in this contracting constellation

will be eating you, and you will know

neither unending sorrow nor eternal bliss

as you wind throughout its starry guts

I will see you again

when we are gathered to a point in the end

by which I mean never, old friend.

Old friend,

you will have lost your contacts

instantly, all in exchange for your
instantaneous kinship with the dead

go ahead and barf

To remember me recall my mangled ungrammatical poem

recall it to yourself as one who briefly understood

the language of various beasts

of ferrets, mongeese, old demented cats

and magical magical dogs

and the fucking-songs of fertile parakeets.

4/22/14 thc