Goodreads
del.icio.us
She was bored of being enervated, at school,
so she whittled the west redwoods into women,
vaulted the ceilings of unquestionable Montana,
she stayed late in cities, then slept
by the departed gods of New York,
a democracy in shambles of panties and words.
For you. For nobody. Dibbed by leeches
but wading with an oar, a wily motion,
a movement to decapitate the water.
She later pulled up rabbits from the ground
along all the boulevards in America,
and grew a shell around her like a scarab.
People called her ma'am.
People halted and asked her phone number.
People of britches, porridge, netting.
People of righteous ardor and plentitude.
I met her shot dead by an old man,
drugged and dragged a half-mile from paradise.
He leveled me a look and called me handsome.
I tried to pick her up but she smelled like people,
and the man with the gun
in the cloak and the grin,
he flipped his tassel, tossed the cap, and said,
"Take her pulse. Go on, put it in you.
It's a snort to hear it beat."
The water travels mountain delusion,
a hallucination of the sky's clean belly.
Suck it from pigs, and Tchaikovsky, моя
крошка, from my fathers and wrens,
mothers and arctic moss.
A stranger laughs, yet sucks this laugh
from godless peonies and prairie-less heavens.
Near my home, the smoke purls from a great stack,
proprietor of its own, gray sunset wind bog.
Suck this pipe nude and lich the marrow,
suck it down the Colorado River,
suck it woe unto me, unto you,
like crumbs from the finger off sucked back cake.
Luxurious saints and musical pups,
bear-headed ostriches, Oz-eyed, marvelous
lovers of candies, I praise you, I sing them,
asleep, I recite and turn the world
for primate armies, praising.
Suck it, onerous everywho, I praise you.
Suck it from naked gutters of knowing.
Arthurian, colobus, wankers and fleshy dolls,
it's silver from the Earth, oil from the veins,
fire from the vents; suck it and talk,
praise and sing.
Arcane blackness will clear our red barracks;
suck from the sheets, suck precise as die-casts,
articulate as trimmed nails, closed lids.
Suck from the still, from the black, from the clear.
It's the water from ice, the smoke from machine,
the blood sapped from olives, the people.
Ray Succre currently lives on the southern Oregon coast with his wife and baby son. He tries hard.