White mums for mom in the hospital.
I'm rutting throughout at the Botticelli bisexual prints,
in hospital hallways pushing elevator buttons with car keys.
Not touching my true feelings anymore,
I should walk eight inches off the floor.
When I enter the room she is half beyond.
She holds a morphine clicker like a patient critic.
No miracle happens when she lifts her tired hand
over the broken bone-ring where I entered the world.
I take the hand. She closes her eyes, then opens them wide
--owlike--to see me for what I am. (She sees.)
She is Nadar suddenly, frightening.
We know the parent-child allegories are beginning to recede.
She begins to use all of her psychic animal senses.
She is warning me of an animal I've tied to my body.
She talks to it wordlessly through my spirit as through a screen-door
then falls back asleep.
I kiss her hand blindly and go hunting.
Let's speak of the worm so humble.
It does not feel nature's scalpel.
It says.
I will sever myself in two.
I will make greater love in.
Pieces watch me now.
As my new lover and I.
Stretch in sex.
As two children.
Pull a purple worm in tug.
Of war we stretch our bodies.
In open-mouth O.
Worm-gasm.
I will sever myself in.
Two I will make earthy.
Love in pieces.
Watch me.
Shiver.
To bits squirming.
In any rain any.
Moistness.
I might.
Feel I.
Leave me.
Klimt-yawn through yellow pollen, a fuck-garden's
levitations. Books perfumed drugs. Drugs perfumed books.
The spider roots of orgasm tingle, years later.
We were like that grandiloquent house at pier's end, Atlantic City,
with the ridiculously shortest address in America, "Ocean One,"
where they lowered a bucket through the kitchen floor
for flopping, gilled Atlantic money. Love was that easy.
Orpheus to Orpheus, shotgunning the night's smoke.
Extended, polyamorous, we cluster-lusted the dead
hungry souls who cruise the young most, though Ancient.
What foul, most natural light broke down the slope
to lure you upwards to suburb, money-lust, wife?
And why I am still here, strumming the lyre of the pubis?
Have I eaten the seven seeds? Do the dead need me more?
W. B. Keckler is a widely-published poet whose work has appeared in over 200 magazines in the U.S. and abroad. Collections include Ants Dissolve in Moonlight from Fugue State Press and Recombinant Image Day from Broken Boulder Press.
W. B.'s poetry has been anthologized in The Gertrude Stein Wards in Innovative American Poetry and The Art of Dance, among others. Fellowships awarded include The National Endowment for the Arts and The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. W. B.'s book reviews and critical pieces authored have appeared in such journals as American Book Review, Washington Review, and Small Press Review.