from "Cosmograph: A Contemplative Prosimetric with Folly & Fly"

Observe the flotilla of our Lady of Sweet Lunacy. Follow her across the watery cosmos to a democratic village of guppies. Cats prowl the hills licking their freaky feline lips. There’s one sucking on fins as guppy survivors retreat behind a little fishy churchyard crying, “O Lord, Protect us! Lead us back to our houses and give us plenty of gasoline.” Gulp, gulp. Guppies giveth protein unto kitty flesh.

But this vision won’t last. Shut my eyes, stroke my ass. Observe the frayed genius of the American Commonplace. It uncoils beneath an ancient elm, its 10,000 scales each painted with a scene of the history of national hunger. On one reality eats every peanut in sight. On another the identity of all creatures competes for a little piece of cheese in a kind of teeming Darwinian swimming pool of objective form. Look, says an amoeba in a Paul Smith lamb’s wool jacket. “I’ve got a piece too.”

The serpent recoils and tightens grip on our Lady’s slipper. Out of its mouth arrive the comedic American poets, each equipped with pithy quips. The Irony Iron Cage Band leads their procession in John Philip Sousa hats. The Cultural Identity Racket applauds with polite reserve, farting art out their arse poeticas. The neo-Ellipticists drag their knuckles over broken lyre wire. Hybridists hibernate in cocoons of strategic satisfaction.

Meanwhile, I’m sinking in a pint of pilsner while my lady turns three times on a magic circle, squats and squirts. The poets laugh. They rush to her embrace. Lap her cheap drip and squirm in gooey ooze, as if she promised jobs in a market of quick sand. Laughter fills the atmosphere. Dead moon rocks absorb the elevated discourse. It goes through space to penetrate a great nothing through which nothing escapes to overwhelm us. And sparrows hunt seed beneath Dame Mercy’s knees. We have names and active verbs and hallucinated wealth and weal. A whispering of ghost voices absorb into the mild night air.