Astral Redux
There are spoken infirmities and spilled lips cloaked in the growl of rusted foliage and mutiny in the eyes and in the ears and in the yawns of faces wrinkled into disrepair and rage furious mold glittering on the clown’s tongue under the streetlight a tail without a dog world offenses and the disjunction of its judges cannot undo any of this yet the boy who painted the evening sky an orchard eager to implode dropped the little dipper of his big idea when he banged his head on the moon and gravity was tilted back and conciousness slid off the table so that arm in arm we took a wormhole through and beyond the astral plane at times colorless but peopled by a stampede of puddles families of stamps and envelopes we heard the machines and taught them thoughtlessness suspicions arose as a sparrow hit the window the honey stood with the consistency of a clay pillar the swagger of a lily endured by sages the monk lighting a cigarette at the memorial I’m remembering what was left of the ribbons in the murder room and of the knife-shaped intruder that came through the keyhole now both puppet and ventriloquist hang by the cat’s cradle of the universal grid a breeze expired on a blade of grass to regard you with funereal indifference as over the coined eyes of an unremembered uncle who burned out in the exit lane I kick the heads off the dandelions saying a prayer to dispel the sound of inner oceans undictated by this or that indiscretion or assault or melodramatic arrival I have my duty and know my name among the garden traveling the beet to its root and back again arms centrifugal in and out of time going the course of nature in the wake of the worm minding my own business hunched over a scythe left and right at the big man’s knees splitting the boulder to which I fastened my libido my back a collapsible antennae my head a radio in the stars my sleep patterns repeating in the rapids of sleep where will you be at midnight among the pranksters conniving under the armored skirts whistling a tune? by Ryan Dowling