Makes derangéd love To the muddy hill. Shoots of green knocked sideways On a factory floor. Next to the stopflood Retaining wall, sprung rhythm. Just as A center for Islamic banking Furls green writing like a blooming branch across the screen, visible Pop-up ad of the market or green fuse. In a wiry flash, A living goddess with a threefoot eye Bends o'er her spreadflat copybook, contemplating a career at maths. I've always been good at maths, And how they multiply, and how they multiply, and how they Lock in a pop-fly, snag the interface, shatter the salary cap, Thwack. Into the tanned glove, a second piece Of hide. It's spring, tumors and mushroom caps pop-up, the avatar Salary man can't muster himself to grope the Pixilated schoolgirl. Sad subways. Before the Senate panel, the discredited chairman holds You gotta keep on dancing Keep on dancing Keep on dancing til the music stops. Amen, says the peacock, Shifting his attentions now to the wall. He shrugs obscenely green, Obscenely jewel-toned, obscenely neck-like, An obscene grandeur and an obscene decadency, A screen, a mask, a dance, A thousand green-groping eyes. Lapse and bless With your largesse, you antique commode, you gossiping fairground— (And now a common bird launches itself at my window A defunct grenade from Spring's blackmarket shouldermount Because I do not know its name And do not wish to watch it stagger from air to glass I hear it re-enunciate & grow increasingly garbled & go On outside the poem that would be increasingly inside, let me in. Where my sleek unbidden brow breaks blood upon the panel, breaks beads amid the streaks of let me in and let me in)
Copyright © 2010 by Joyelle McSweeney. Used with permission of the author.