Vulpine Orders (new poem)
Vulpine Orders
This verse is not about the spider marrying the deer.
That verse is to the left and then inside the chamber.
Nor is this verse about the Quizno’s burned down by
an evil story, which is still hovering in the smoke.
(The verse is hovering in the smoke.)
No verse about goose grease haunts this verse;
nothing comes easy. There is a glove compartment
trapped somewhere inside that verse. What,
an owner’s manual? There is a verse about the Taliban
of Atlantis, mumbling quite close undersea,
but this verse is not it by a long mile. The moon
holds a knife to the night’s throat, saying: …or else.
Which could be a verse but this is getting nowhere.
There’s something else in this verse, an interactive
sequence that is not verse at all, but akin to verse,
in that it searches out in all directions for similarities
not its own, likenesses which hide in the shadows
that verses cast.
But still, it’s close. Glancing up
and into the corner of the eye, the flawless
factory of verses comes to purchase this color
and that weight. This
is not the right order. But what do the verses
care? They are not each other’s friends
on the line. (The local anesthesia is
wearing off.) This is not the foxglove
dissassembled paw by paw by lamplight, and
these are not the heartbeats pressed into the dull
bestiary of a minor garden. There is something
else entirely inside: the naturally
dead, the worm of henhouse cocaine,
the desolation of nothing to eat but the
garlands of friends.
This rocks. (period)
This is fantastic.