The Father and Ruler of All Things

Struggle is good/doncha understood
Rapped the motivational speaker
Just so, in China (little known
As home to the agonistic spirit)
They boil their dogs alive so adrenaline
Tenderises the meat. Paradox
Upon paradox. While in the reforested area
Where erosion exposes their warrens
After rain, and an ancient Sunshine Harvester
Lies rusting, rabbits reoccupy
The niche they wrested from whatever native species

Exotericism

If someone above you told you to do something
Like kill every last Amelekite, would you
Copy them in on all relevant correspondence
Incredibly deep in its profoundness
The dust jacket proclaimed
Yet rather either meaningless or grappling only
Onto the rugose surfaces of worlds
Infinite in number, yet excluding this one
Where only by fond analogy
A man resembles a tree
Whose roots penetrate the bowels of the Earth
Just so, awkward implications proliferate
In places difficult to clean
Hallucinations too, such as balancing
On your tiptoes on something that may be a bomb
As a means of locomotion, of getting from A to B

Reunion

We went back to the old house, the one
On the promontory way out in dry country
The fountain was still there in the glassed-in
Gazebo among the elk horns and so on
Still full of water, rank, not running
But lashed by tentacles of cephalopods
Grown bigger and more numerous
Just like kombucha “mushrooms” since our day
But we forgot to check that no new
Resident objected to our presence, and we
Were interrupted by a middle-aged
Woman, dwarfish and stolid, with brutal haircut
Brandishing a spice rack loaded
With mushroom powder, that when we failed
Her interrogation, she started spinning
Like a Russian roulette wheel
With bullets in every receptacle
Causing us to hallucinate the last ten years
Join hands with her, and with the tentacles
Whirl round and round, sneeze twice, and fall down dead

Plot Coupons

I don’t know what they are but
There are laws governing the behaviour of all bodies
Explanation has to stop somewhere
What shape, et cetera, has a piece of wax

Misshapen lines all having died out
In the Dreamtime of acceptable miracles
Now there is only the farmland one sees going into the city
Juxtaposed with abstract or postmodern sculpture

And the haven for snakes behind the railway station
Like the persistence of witch trials all the way
Up to the measurement of stellar parallax
Then there is the constant angle at which the female

Anglerfish views her lantern, and how
The male experiences his dissolution into her

A Battery of Magic Cabinets

One seemingly of wattle and daub
On closer inspection merely a hole
In the ground turned inside-out
Like a pocket. The other of crystal

You light up the bulb overhead
The salt bridge Bifrost joins them
The rust climbs up to your throat
And you stop talking