FAUST'S CURSE

Maritornes Shucking

Maritornes shucking the cloister from the manse of my feet rebinding foot-wraps loosened by thumb and fore and del Toboso to whom I owe no small debt of gratitude for jesting and poling

between syntax and phalange where no man in the rights of his mind would wander unwary of devils and windmills and Sancho rubbing the corns and barite from the heels of a knight-ornate

skipping stones like jujubes on the not so flat surface of the Styx where Charon too poles between heathen and hell with an eye on prow and stern and a sophistication for chivalry and

lords dancing in the curse of my thoughts

A Switch to Hide

And she skulks down the lope of my thigh her eyes trained on seams and cuffs and folded up pants bottoms ruffed with grime and battery acid that my father’s car leaked with the rarest

impunity and he without a switch to hide and tan the skin crooked round the caulk of my leg where she’s trained to know the difference between a whimper and a yawl unlike my father

who’s jaded indifference to smarting and welts left when the scamp of his fist lays flat into the hard bone of my ass and the fucking battery acid chinking a hole in the roll of my trousers just

below where the ankle makes purchase with the knee that always seems to be brogue with
grass and mud stained deep into the treacle where my unlaced shoe scuffs gyps of stone and

mason’s dust dusted round the kin of my face like my dear father’s but without the mints and lye bitter taste of last night’s whisky flummoxed in the cope of his hard round mouth then she

bites down hard on the clap of my leg where bone scuttles skin from where the shoe tongue
spites the instep with blisters and crapes of denim happed from the inside out of the leg she’s

trained to cope whimpers and yawls from with the uneven bevel of teeth too small and crooked to chew the fat off the riche of a steak driven through the fist of my heart droned with battery

acid and the flat of my father’s well-trained hand

Chopin’s Fingers

I wrote this poem this morning while listening to Chopin chouse fingers against ivory-white keys
culled from dead elephants and narwhale pike to address the issue of paying homage and no

little respect to the Polish skulls raked and smithereened through ash clips and bone by Stalinist cunts with nothing better to do than reeve ass from jawbone like Black Angus to the slaughter

pins and bolts jack-hammered into unsuspecting skull cups knees buckling into sawdust and miller’s grease left after the slaughterers go home to fuck wives with too small teeth and gin

stale breath and Oprah’s tittering fresh in the mope of their thoughts and bridge hands trumping children’s washing and balanced meals fucking Stepford wives those forty-five

thousand and more ploughed into early graves with jackboots and silly grins and that fucking loud popping issuing from skulls kicked free of neck and collar it seems only too fitting that I

read this well-forgotten mistake in logic in a bar named the Advent and Large or whatever and wherever I am blithering like Oprah or Doctor Phil on meth and speed

Czarist Equestrienne

And I shuck the skin
From the larder of her thighs

Switch with cockles and burrs
And her breathing off cantor

Penetralia block and tackled, baying
From the ceiling shims

Prometheus’ Sorrow

Prometheus doesn’t like crows or clove-oranges or dry biscuits slurry with blood or Van Goth’s ear (shorn from its pulpit) or Picassos’ blue lined sailors shirts or (for that matter) cubists or

rhomboids (no matter how equidistant) or that czarist cunt with a taste for the roan and gallop and a penchant for plum wine and lard and tallow cut from the crook of a sow’s leg where the

hip caps the socket and joist (no he has neither time nor patience) for lollygaggers and cubists and Van Goth’s ear curd-fallow with sunflower oil and Burgee’s medicinal panacea (for hoof and

mouth and trench foot) and all that ails you with the exception of crows’ caw cawing and pecking the sclera from the whites of your eyes

She Was Skilled at Alchemy

She was skilled at alchemy and coaxing money from the lurch of pockets thread-bare with transit-stubs and hard candy wrappers like the bridge mixture my mother bowled for the

cuckolding neighbor’s wives with hive hair and breast-satrap marks weld into freckled shoulders and their children with snotty noses and unkemptness that was unseemly and fucking

sad was the one with thalidomide arms like mitts and chuck round the creel of his mouth where his older brother spooned hacks of gruel and meat byproducts against his better judgment and

their self-proclaimed mothers’ trumping each other and talking about macramé and stitching hems with the same fingers that cached sperm from the ends of their husbands’ tallow pale cocks