Saturday, April 25, 2020

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