Grand Guffaw

…Yes, a day is merely forever
In memory’s shiningness,
And a year but a gust or gasp
In the summer’s heat of Time, and in that last summer
I was almost ready to learn
What imagination is; it is only
The lie we must learn to live by, if ever
We mean to live at all. Times change.
Things change. And K up and gone, and the summer
Gone, and I longed to know the world’s name.

Robert Penn Warren

On a dare Lady A
Stuffs the cannonball
Of her fist
Into the squat of
Green’s mouth.
Breathing the metallic bite
Of her skinned knuckles,
He’s never
Looked happier.
 
An arbiter of
Light and shadow, Mick
Takes pictures
To commemorate the feat.
Like a diver knifing
Through surf,
He paddles to the
Strange glowing reef
Of spectacle,
Gathering in its brilliance,
Warming to its glow.

The only man post-modern
Enough to grind
With Ficus Benjamina,
Moz dances with the potted tree
In the corner.
Shedding his shirt like an
Over-nourished leaf,
He treads the night like a
Synchronized swimmer.
 
Black wine overruns the  
Shallow well of
Most’s lips.
In this city of
Last stands he contorts
Into a cup to
Collect all it will give.

This is the family
You’ve chosen.
Slim pipers courting death,
Unjust assassins
Dancing under leviathan
Moons not quite full.
 
In this chirping nest
Of nonsense,
Darkness made a lover
Of desperation.
Heaving baskets of bones
Listen to this sex,
Their hips trying to
Make song
Of its exquisite
Irreparable swinging.

Not afraid to be wrong
About all
The most important things,
Like where are
My keys, what time is it,
Where do
I go from here.

Originally published in the White Whale Review