the words that pervert us
can entertain us too,
and enter as guests
groping for nothing,
like lonely ghosts
at home
poetry is an excellent
hobby, Mr. Smith,
for us who do not imagine
extraneous things, like words
that actually succeed in meaning
things, and menacing
the nothing, like budgerigars,
orgasms, and kittens
poetry is like drinking —
a cheaper semantic
oblivion
night could be snow-blind a while
as time accumulates justice,
just deposits in the blood,
like love in the liver,
meaning nowhere
and we assembled us
out of the tiny crystals,
and their living
crawling back within
this nothingness
a night is,
timeless abyss
washed with sulphate,
tears, and memories
still times fall around us
fallaciously, there are no memories
there, worth recording, the girth
of dismal decades where years went,
forgetful, like re-membering the eighties,
maybe
snow-blind still, this is history
willing ill, and children collected
corpses on day's brutal beach,
mysterious timeless will
of sodden washed-up
god, tired witless
sodden log
his myriads of mindless frogs
love him like nothing,
a prayer lost
blowing in this fatal wind
like an autumn leaf,
like sand corns on a beach,
dead as his living
belief, the truth resurrection
bled, it bleeds
yet, worthless and
perfect
this madness is the suicide of argument
and logic, so appropriate when meanings
whore themselves, to regulate bodies
and feelings that know their own reasons,
the myth of words' godly origin is the sewer
they shit in, oblivious soul-seers and their
dismal dreams, policing peoples in the popular
voice, listless lepers dropping fingers
and feeble unreason, curative fascism dictating
a day's dogmatic oblivion, the cock-sucker's clock
they follow, the ambulant mad dressed in white
like torturers and whores — reason's final
night, as ever, dressed in liar's white
David McLean has a chapbook, a hunger for mourning by erbacce press on sale at Lulu, an electronic chapbook with Why Vandalism?, and a forthcoming full length book with Whistling Shade Press in April or May 2008, Cadaver's Dance. Check out his blog at http://mourningabortion.blogspot.com/.