Why thought systems leak

“May God keep us from single vision and Newton’s sleep.” William Blake

 

Your fat coconuts of love

they rise above me like spoons

erect with bloated kites of wind

and amygdalae carcassing with the

stuttering syntax of social scientists

caned into a discipline of whiskey

dripped dragonflies in amber and time,

and 582-years of pre-Renaissance manuscripts,

and simple animals hiding within lines

and song stories of extinct laughter,

in episodes of brief herring—storms

fall like trees in the battering of

foreign alphabets and moon-ice

and liquids made from the metal

of an elephant’s secret naval academy

of chess-boards, generated into one

single theory of unspooled wheels;

Its laundry bundle of thoughts

now dust-mited across galaxies

of a million books

telling me nothing in a darkening

shroud of quasi-intuitional armpits,

which speak so slowly

that they must remain as color

along a spectrograph, like paper

in sequential chains of illegible punch-lines;

religious objects and diverse appetites

stretched, tanned and counted like hides

before being disguised as poems,

when hunger cries out for

senseless shapes and

momentary patterns of mangrove

muds articulated as

a Joycean diction

channeling the quick flash of a face;

and hearing a joke

for an entire lifetime

translated into a condensate

of cellular intoned prawns, inching

forward in tiny traces

of lipsmeared mucous.

 

JZRothstein (final edit) 2/9/2014