from Prisoner’s Cinema
in extremis I was
a figure on a path.
A stranger recruited from an eave
at the World’s Largest Truck Stop, I held
a styrofoam cup of instant coffee
and my dog-eared volume of Common Prayer.
Called out by a circle of children
huddled over a baby rattler
with percussive up-rush the sudden
flight of mice to the Mesquite.
Their keeper, a blowsy girl in Princess Leia buns
swooned on the arm of her bigamist — both amply dosed
on creosote vapor
the plunge of her dress revealed
breasts, sorely wealed
and the site consumed me — as the chili plucks
the bud — did this girl arouse
such stutters in my function.
Stripped down to the greaves, I strode
into the weedy field behind the Men’s
and there emerged the one called “Mouth”
obstreperous little devil
squat and stacked as a Swiss army knife.
I asked “What do you stand for, Mouth?
Objectionable reliquary of living matter.”
Next thing I know we’re wounding the poppy
for an ooze of its milky sap
made banquet of opioid, watercress, wormwood …
Could have been a week that passed
or several minutes.
*
The Mouth unleashed his coated tongue, wad of sweet gum,
scant hair from a black-tailed deer—
such pharmacopic sorcery was never seen.
Seized in an orgiastic rear
at the knee of the next world
several visions commenced:
-A woman stalled at the threshold with a ripe plum.
-Scrap of scarlet flagging on the nuptial bed.
And this vision of Finisia
fashioning for the wood stove a “shit burrito”
from newspaper and digestion’s bounty.
Lucid dream this
seems so lifelike
my mild pastoral hope
grown timorous.
Wake me when my quaking’s done.
*
I had a jackal in my genus.
I moved among branches, nimbly.
Rose to my feet in the Pleistocene
to fulfill the human schematic
of hair, backbone, milk production,
musculature and motion of limbs.
Now, in a glitz of newly minted quarters,
in the tobacco-stained chintz of the drapery
a pearl-handled switch
taps the glass
come out, come out, and admit the blade.
Now’s the day I pay the piper.
Now’s the plague of sulfured egg.
*
In order to test the tensile strength of the resource chain
(otherwise known as “the others among us”)
we tilled an unnatural row, sewed a house-broken seed
and there sprouted the singularity.
Blight latched the new buds.
Peril unwound in strangling vines.
My mother called it widowmaker,
the blackened snag that forked my sight
and hatched the spore that mapped this
archipelago of blood into my handkerchief.
I long to live again
in the murmur of larvae
bioluminescence
in dentrical arms of radiolarian.
An ordinary being should be consecrated.
*
Through pressure, vertiginous momentum
(as pottery is turned on a wheel)
my Lord forms me.
Was it His hands that shaped the charismatic megafauna
and rendered cryptic the Phylliidae?
I tied my rag to the branch to pacify His ghost
but the boughs interlaced and the canopy closed.
Subsisting, now, on the dark understory.
It might be interesting to see what I look like.
But I can never get into that shaft of light
that creeps in this cave, because the people
block my way —
Bored a wound, in time,
into the cleanly carved escarpment
for I wanted to sleep off the dream, Lord,
admit no more
fear into my temple.
I should have been a better friend to myself.
* * * *
The italicized text in the final section is quoted from The Divided Self by R. D. Laing (the testimony of “Joan”).