Death Style 8.17.20

Surely I am evading my responsibilities:

hiding out in the backyard, choosing to believe

my teens are working/learning when they are

pursuing their own privacy on the Internet

like nymphs gathering blooms in a bright field above a seam

a bird-eye ticks at the bottom of the well

and won’t give back even light

it wants to blink

wants to rub its own eye

and go to sleep

in the seam of itself

I want something pulled out of me

like a maiden witched back up out of the well

or maybe i want

to slit and blink at the bottom of it

let the heir tumble into me

live forever there

dead and romantic

well that’s one way to do it

become a holy well

in the holy see

in the middle of the night

in the middle of the night

we watch 8mm films about the island of hydra

an island named for water

as if to hide itself in its name

in its own open eye

there Leonard and Marianne swim and swim

as if the water itself

is the island of hydra

eviscerating itself

in clear alcohol

ouzo and ozone

i need that operation

to take the ache out

a useless instrument left there by a god

a brass instrument with a knot in its middle

ancient huntresses went around in holy girdles

ancient matrons whipped out their breasts

in a fervor, ripped up their sons

with their seamrippers

snip snip went the seam

between temperance, intemperance

they invented tragedy

then hurled the whole world through it

a periphery perforated by

absurdity and calamity

like funeral games performed for a slain infant

where the victor wins a crown of celery

If you are going to wear a crown, it should be made of something

ridiculous, that bobs

I take this lesson to heart

I take this lesson to heart

when I imagine we meet at the bottom of the sea

and you are something pollen-like and flourishing in the nitrogen seams

and I grub around with comically distended jaws

dismayed by so much gravity and

bearing a fleshy bauble pedunculating from my brow

like the watchfire on Mount Arachne

in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon

lit up second-to-last

before the bad news comes crashing home

to run the murder-bath

as like a jerk

I jerk about in the birdbath

trying to focus the world’s image

in each of my four fovea

as time flies by on jerk’s wings

and my alarm clock brain keeps slotting, slotting

through all the devotional hours of the day

I have to jerk my head to one side

I have to slit my eyes

I have to look at it

sidewise

like a pencil rolling under the desk

byebye

when I receive a phonecall

from a gentleman named Spam Risk

who resides in Black Eddy, Pennsylvania

I do not answer it.