A Mounting Song

Your name will be Sagging Pants Picking Icicles.
We release you from the Tribe, so go now
into your claptrap Gondwanaland.

Supercontinent of want—broken, adrift.
Déjà vu of the Everything Monstrous,
not recognized, not quite recognized . . .
yet florid with your preposterous epaulettes,
your extinction events and mighty dubiousness.
You will be a paradox among your frozen things—
thing that you are but cannot entirely inhabit.

You will not know, but you will roar,
and your roaring will become your knowing.
You will roar yourself through mootness
and moon-stanchioned glossolalia,
through glaciations of relinquishment
and the occupations of morticious brood lizards.
Roarer, perseverer, tousle-capped
with your tintinnabular twilit consciousness,
you will be the glut gargoyle
spouting off loutish plaints
from the swamped mortarboard heavens,
the nincompoop swain of Sheela-na-Gigs,
the ring-a-ling-linger of little lightnings.

Who will come to hear? Firebird will come to hear!

Firebird will build aeries in your belly pit
out of tar and flint stone.
He’ll sashay like an exploding peacock
among your collectables’ aisles’ neat symmetries,
shaking his bombardier ass,
molting his tail feathers in a lewd aurora
to incubate your drip-grown hatcheries.

Firebird boogies to your vandal evensong!
Your unpuckered troglodyte canticle!
Be stray! Go dissonant,
hooligan tongue
quailing out off key,
a cheap carpet unwoven in your dust-purge thumping,
as ice is only a cheap carpet of cold’s gimp weaving.

New Weaver, Fire Feather Weaver,
weaving your sexy paeans to gravitas as you galosh about
in your asbestos suspenders,
shake loose your Krishna hair!
Melt your muddy rivers
over the world’s huckstered hatbox,
over the closet cliffshelves,
down into the dream gutters,
down to that old La Brea umbrellaland,
mitten-ripe and moth-ballsy,
where tower tarts grow hairy for the harvest.

Don’t you know if he loves you?
He who hears all songs—
the Great Conflagrated Listener
who soars and dives at every rut of your incantations?

Bow to him, Sagging Pants,
on your old clay knees.
He’s your Loa, your jinn.
Come down from your boottips and your frostbit fingers
that reach into the icy arbors, and reach, and reach
for that perfect Tooth of Translucence.

Shout, “Here’s your chariot, creaking and snorting,
slathered in a slack gray hide!”
You bagpipe colossus
with pterodactyl wing ears,
all your strength concentrated into one brute long limb,
chimpanzee lipped,
and all your want, an ancient pelvic motion—
the upheaved earth slowly coming
to abide his rhythm.
And you will sing it like this:

I am a landslide, I am a storm!
I have dirtied your fastidious universe
with my horse-tongued kiss.
Who was more startled, you or me,
when I felt you ache to step into my hooves,
and prance?

[see note on this post]

NEXT PAGE »