Sunday, September 30, 2007

This festooned satyricon

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Some Lost September

Just over there, explaining to the man about my elaborate headpiece, no concern that I’ve no idea of any one of the five critical double-yews. His face is huge, not orange, a phonebook full of chins, but this is not China. I tell him the bones were from a range steer named Gus and that he died like years ago on Chama scrubland and that I happened upon what twenty weathers left of him and now his cleaved pelvis adorns my crown.

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“I carried Gus, split marrow powder spilling, clacking in my arms some half mile through micro-cactus that would just as soon punch leather in your sandal as hide in sparse summer dung-grass.” The man’s eyes widen, but are largely unimpressed. He has something else on his mind. A serving girl approaches offering refreshment and hors d’oeuvres, her silver plate magnetizing his will. He trumples off and I turn with a calcified flitter. Evening air washes over me like the proximal sound of jets.

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Back here now and tell me how many times you’ve awakened to your senses teetering on a ladder? Longing and lustworn, the residual images of your mouth and nose running slowly up the inside of female legs so smooth and fragrant you were certain you had found God’s doormat? Or found yourself wandered in some festooned satyricon of disjointed enjumblement, crystalline light ricocheting off the absurdities like impossible tableware set in heliotropic Neptunian twilight?

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This is how it is at the end of this brutal September, this tender September, this month of dead summers and thriving autumns when the retreat of starry scorpions splashes the edges of some Pacific thing you try holding onto but foolishly relinquish in a forced poem or song you have no business writing in the first place. But you do it anyway because passing things die strong in you. They kick and cling, scratch and snake, squeeze sweat from gaping pores you would flush an ocean through if you could do so with grace or cunning. Thus, one sweep of a reaping pen lays waste the till of another misspent labor.

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The headpiece is heavy now and gravity is having its way. The chores of the day await your attendance and snapping birds outside don’t give a quirp about any of it, not at all. Instead, their seasonal foraging confers a hollow guilt because you choose to mine these few lines from a dream that was never there, that no one else alive or living can ever know about unless you do. So bones break away and heads are bare. You have this and this is all you will keep. Nothing of so little value ever came from something of so little worth. But keep it, keep it dear and close, nestled gently against oblivion’s suckled bosom, archived in some lost September.

Joseph Gallo
September 30, 2007

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3 Comments:

Blogger Unknown parried...

Very cool, Joseph. For me this evokes a kind of wasteland of summer entropy. Horse latitudes of the soul. I can relate.

October 01, 2007 1:12 AM  
Blogger Joseph Gallo parried...

Horse latitudes of the soul...

I like that.

A poet such as yourself should know never to leave such things lying around. All poets are thieves; everyone knows that. ;-)

Summer entropy... reminds me of a poem I wrote called Entropy Takes Energy.

This poem, written on the last day of September, came from a dream. The first two stanzas are nearly literal. The rest was just pulling the thread to unravel a garment of suspect fabric.

Clever clever poets are we, eh? LOL

October 01, 2007 9:04 AM  
Blogger Rax parried...

very clever indeed. wonderful journey into a beautifully dark mind. love the headpiece :)

October 03, 2007 7:46 AM  

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