The sleep whoever sleeps toys with distant interests & Liver
by Dave Shortt
[ poetry - december 11 ]
The sleep whoever sleeps toys with distant interests
remember memoriless,
without special relative,
what is homogeneous, old trees
corroborate
dream of running around their circumferences
to stay warm
(very clean houses
without owls,
food everywhere exposed in the rooms
a caged bird saying
'we love hollywood,
in the flesh
wouldn't be the same'
a native land where
laws were born
jaws were born to nod
off under
slack vertebrae, spine sure
til hurricanes blow
roofs off but
'we left there long ago'
returning to debt
every move a debt, or
credit?
smell the air
along the way, the children
endow each flower with
prevention or
breakthrough
into puberty's silences
traveling west, some hours
were gained, the sun
collaborating with jets sowing
the sky with deals
to create this frontier of
varying mass, where
the sunset's colors tell
who's younger, who's older, whether
a kid'll happen along
resetting the clocks before deciding
should it compel deer or
leave them alone?
every word a mannerism
nowhere near a bath in the river,
animals consumed by appearance
let furs stiffen,
surface runoff from flash storms
flows into the first layer
of a new mountain range
(something barely
human can still be suggested
beyond the formalism of violence & war)
things slow down into
permanent alliances with 'non-renewable'
resources & bodies,
tons of motor vehicles get flagged through,
excavated pipes deviating ornery weather
are just spit
shining the antiques
the moon was made an icon
of religious wars,
but in company of
a simple supper
no spacecraft or alphabetical order
or abortion
would use it for an additive,
an extra,
so it's nothing unless
it's a stone roughening the function
of a kidney
the million-&-nth zen patriarch
slipped into her womb
'a force field in want of nothing,'
down the white tunnel
knew he'd be evicted or
he wouldn't've,
clot hiding immortal wave functions
galvanizes her mama dharma, can it
swing in the trees?
(it didn't seem planned that way
it was just how they met)
radios break morning
with descriptions of violent & soothing dreams,
fade to
sound of crickets continuing all day,
in alarm
Liver
at night she hides,
scrubbing the blood clean
of yeast-laden glory,
paid back the next day
seeing a man excrete his life
disarmament factory built on
swampy, low-lying ground,
while the owner gets drunk,
a worker's aversion to water hammers out
a surprise deal with B vitamins
to contain a skin-slick
reaching fine baleen'd populations
methane-fart mourning
in the war on sloth & ignorance, undigested light
sticks to neurotoxins in obese divinities
hugged for warmth by
amalgam'd single mothers
unable to clear their skinny veins
of aspirations to high mammalhood
booze & a long list of poisons
leave their mark
til transparency is distilled from
a mash of health & beauty,
at least one of many fearless organs
(wild animals lounging on ledges of skeleton)
surmounts its work's bi-product cynicism,
its caution & inexperience grow scarred
as it extracts cesspools of conditions
(& itself)
from high-proof sweetsour biosphères
debatable
evolved wastes
dream predatorally in the back
before being further broken down or petted
bilous thirst
from too much dirt in the food,
dead moths transmigrate there in homage,
cling in long hydrocarbon chains
during sub-marine examination of each pesticide
systemic
herbicides for the perfect whiskey,
moonshiners imbibe aroma of honeysuckle
gaining in purity all night long,
when they break fast, coffee
is first political act
poured into the hydrochloric unknown
milk thistle,
dandelion,
(they say) transcend earth, disperse nebulae
like headaches,
these common functions
'make fools of us all', familiarly,
their specialty matched in pristeen autonomy
by water, before it gave birth
to its baby amoebae
wake one day,
murkier, destined
to age as a chicken or veal,
an animal-free planet possessed
by yellowish hepatital moons
rises above one hip
metal-flecked,
between 9 PM & 3 AM,
precious stones cry out, lost subdermally,
who can tell?
a cached lifeboat set adrift
through dark, radioactive
innocence
