The Absent One
This brutal brother but whose word was true, steadfast in the face of sacrifice, diamond and wild boar, ingenious and helpful, held himself in the center of all misunderstandings like a resinous tree in the cold admitting of no alloy. Against the bestiary of lies tormenting him with its goblins and its whirlwinds, [...]
from The Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems 1969-1999 - BUY THE BOOK
.
LEDGELIFE
The taller the monument, the more impatient our luggage. Look, look, a graveyard has fancy dirt.
Historians agree: this is the pebble which beaned Goliath.
Every billboard is theoretically as beautiful as what lies unseen behind it.
Mouth: the word’s exit-wound.
It is [...]
.
CHRISTMAS AT THE ORPHANAGE
But if they’d give us toys and twice the stuff most
parents splurge on the average kid, orphans, I submit, need more than enough;
in fact, stacks wrapped with our names nearly hid
the tree: these sparkling allotments yearly
guaranteed a lack of–what?–family?–
I knew exactly what it was I missed as we were lined up number [...]
FEEDING THE SUN
One day we notice that the sun
needs feeding. Immediately
a crash program begins: we fill rockets
with wheat, smoke-rings, razorblades, then,
after long aiming
–they’re off. Hulls specially alloyed
so as not to melt before the stuff
gets delivered we pour cattle rivers windmills,
aborigines etcet into the sun which
however, grows stubbornly
smaller, paler. Finally
of course we run out of things [...]
Miles from Somewhere
I
A plane descends,
throws its shadow
on the ground: a giant cross,
a giant, all-consuming cross.
A man and a woman
are walking, the shadow
eats them briefly, then sun
again.
II
It’s tricky, isn’t it, talking about love,
like talking about socialist art (demanded, of course,
in the strictest realism, else said to sap
the foundations of socialism), he says,
too smugly, she thinks and [...]
