AFTERHEX 3 

 

 

One’s opportunities to be unhappy are 

 

One’s singlemost inheritance, all other un

 

-ities requiring acknowledgment of pen 

 

-dant interests, it’s a miracle to whom, what person 

 

You’re still alive?     The city is an alphabet 

 

Of numbers, those past 26 a sudden never 

 

-Ending and boundlessness, but once so short and narrow 

 

You sang it as you smashed toy trains together, the 

 

Sneering green engine smashing into the blue engine 

 

That really smiled, how useful, but how really useful 

 

Reverse nostalgia of the unfamiliar grid 

 

Becoming home, all comfort is decay,     the city 

 

You’re sure is not a living thing because it gets 

 

Harder as it decays, more fatal where there’s less 

 

Of it, until it’s gone and all at once not fatal

 

In hills you once imagined, green hills cushion-soft 

                                                                                                                     

Upon which you imagined you would lay a gingham 

 

Blanket, a wicker basket, then from the latter pull 

 

A cartoon sandwich and a cartoon slice of pie 

 

On a white plate, life a cartoon, the world, except 

 

The slice itself is plastic, a dog’s chew toy, your

 

Dog’s toy, it matches neither world exactly, not

 

The cartoon world you when you were a child imagined 

 

And not the world, the wrong     colors in the cartoon 

 

The texture of the colors wrong, no life in the world 

 

No life at all, but in the cartoon it’s too much

 

Of the world and all the life in the world, the plastic pie 

 

All comfort is decay.     And you have spent your middled 

 

Life searching for the turkey leg the greedy wolf 

 

Pulled last from the basket in the cartoon, after watching 

 

Which your imagination then developed almost 

 

Without your input, you’ve searched     passively, it’s true 

 

You’ve sat at the dining table in the afternoon 

 

And who are they, this family, you want to say 

 

Arisen, but you want to say They manifested

 

Like moaning spirits in a bog, uncertain where 

 

You got the image from, every Thanksgiving you 

 

Have sat     at the festooned table in the afternoon, a bib 

 

From the Red Lobster in the heart     of the next town over 

 

Around your neck, knife in one hand, fork in the other 

 

And licked your maw exactly like the greedy wolf 

 

As if your hunger were a spell you cast on the food 

 

But never has the cartoon turkey leg appeared 

 

The perfect, brazen turkey leg you’ve hungered for 

 

Since you were small, when you first saw the brazen leg 

 

Drawn steaming from the picnic basket like a sword 

 

Drawn steaming from the entrails of your enemy 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DISPHOTIC ZONE 

 

 

Yourself, that you were praising the pale dead 

 

Halfway yourself, and half     there and half not there 

 

At which yourself will be removed, in the mid- 

 

dle depths, where light is hypnotized from the water 

 

 

 

By the gaining deep.     To say a darkness walks 

 

Always beneath your body is     not to say 

 

You walk in light. Light     cherishes a fox 

 

Crossing the lake above you. Run away 

 

 

 

From the bigger animal, or chase the smaller 

 

More you than you,     from fear of you,     from the womb 

 

Be eaten then, or eat, be killed     then, kill, far 

 

The fox’s shore, but you will be consumed 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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IF YOU TOLERATE THIS THEN YOUR CHILDREN WILL BE NEXT

 

 

The penguins in the Doctor Strange wolf’s jet 

 

Next to his head look small as bowling pins 

 

       I’m shopping Benzes with my mans 

 

When has the dealer made me happy yet 

 

 

 

When did a war last make you cry?     It ain’t 

 

Me askin’, babe. My     racist friend don’t talk 

 

       Except to them as do not look 

 

Like him,     to whom he speaks no cant, but cain’t

 

 

 

The flyby shakes the retconned golden dice 

 

Somewhere you’ve never been, a     nomad paces 

 

       He woke to shouting from our houses 

 

Last night.     His dog is bloody with our lice 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

POLICE HORSES ON BOSTON COMMON

 

 

It wasn’t winter, was it     April, was it June 

 

The horses on the Common, still, 

 

                                                     tall as tall towers  

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Each horse still     with the liquid stillness of a living thing 

 

Liquid, but will not settle into, take the shape 

 

Of any one container, not     even itself 

 

Clopped over, shaking its head,     each, a forward-going 

 

No, led from the staging area, concrete,     so not 

 

A stable, to the rise, 

 

                                    it must have been a rise   

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In the grass, on which each horse assumed magnificence 

 

The flying boundaries festooned by college banners 

 

Or was it May?     July?     The future was New England 

 

Because we die in the future.     Good ye the little banners 

 

Made big by kindless stretching,     and yet saggily 

 

Empurpling the dirty bricks.     It wasn’t that 

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The cops ennobled them, the danger, no, but that 

 

The horses made the cops seem     decorative,     November 

 

Queasy with still green summer, life outliving life