Whiskered, lithe, the guinea pigs
(not! You fruitcake. Look at them:
two stub-foot stockings
stuffed with phlegm. With teeth.)
rotund, decipher hieroglyphs

"There—which is it now?" the worker asks,
his voice dulled gruel behind the mask,
"a Pleasing Fungus, possibly the Mealybug Destroyer?
Warty Leaf? Dull Tumblebug?"

The sofa stands no chance. Our home's a lab
for cultivating age: within a week
or two, new threads will fray to drab,
the TV cloud with dust, oiled hinges creak,

Ammonium Chloride, burned, breaks apart
then re-combines to a particulate cloud
revered in pyrotechnics. Its effect on skin
is corrosive.

The Ouagadougou convent opens for outsiders

The wallpaper hides some mysterious creatures
that merely emerge when the air of a room
has tabled its task herding dust into corners
to glom into bunnies and wait for the broom.

I.

There was once a fat feline from France,
who when hunting would do a small dance.
"Tra-la-la," she would say,
"see the furry flab sway"
and the mice would be meat in her trance.

II.

My rake stabbed in, out, in like schools
of fish darting at a bait drawn
and denied, scraping the dead leaves, the rake
a clawed hand grasping ground at the edge of a grave

The piano teacher came rushed
from burying a father of two crushed
to sand in the Asian tsunami. The dog,
bored with a day inside, sneaks socks
and crouches beneath the pool table, woodpecker-

An Ekphrasic Odyssey
(I can't display the painting here, but you get the picture.)
 

What the fuck were you thinking, numb-nuts? It's
an M.
At twelve thousand dollars

The cattle bowed their heads, lowed, razed the barn,
trundled through the struts like bricks
on spindles, crushed the fencepost wicks
before the sunrise crimson weir

Thrice Etched on Heimdal's Runestone

Poem-a-day, poem-a-day, twaddle-de-tripe,
be thee like Carroll and hunt thee a snipe.
Poem-a-day, poem-a-day, drivel-de-dee,

Higgeldy piggeldy
Ludwig van Beethoven
scribbled nine symphonies
score after score.

Writing a verse or two
double-dactylic'ly
seems to me frankly a
much greater chore.

In voyaging that way
we sink to observers,
other options de facto absent.
We peer through
outdated machinery–
no higher minds,
but better tools–
still forced to loan

The tadpoles watched the wrinkled frog inflate his cheeks
and nudged each other's slimy joints with wet webbed fins
and flicking tongues. The tailless ass, they said, and smirked.

Your trail remains, circuitous and slick,
a twisted, shining ode to aimless thought
but you are vanished, tragically affixed;
a precipice of slats contains you, caught,