from CARRION SUITE

for Jared Hayes

I. Wry Savages
The bats always come back, making music by striking against footprints
Filling the world with the humor for a low intrigue
The emergence of lover and assassin, a congress of empty rooms
Useless and therefore trustworthy
A problem confronting an imaginary sex
[line accepted though obscured for continuity]

In circuits—ever, however, someone plays the piano
Of the occupation reasons which the stars permit
An unpropitiated snuggling of a greater anemone
To the unscrambled accidents of the obvious
Your rhythmic bedroom is nursery to flesh, girl flesh
Wolf flesh, meat in the doorway, spilling into the orchard
The smell of autumn, a vicious banquet of proposition
A dining room of Sawako candles,
The accuracy of arrangement pauses to remember
Parched vessels of the ocean’s milk cuff
Into which we reach, discounting the confluence of fluids
“Its hints of earlier and other creation:”
Backbones slither glittering, rough and cool
Wings clamor the city’s foam glee
The more delicate view is nothing if not ambitious before the crime
On the suburban tennis court of your spirited pasts
Where the gears of voices have unhinged the attractor
Of The Modern Empress Disaster
Unzip your victims
And puff on them a bit until the room begins to sparkle
Error
Is the sparkle of your spirited past
Heard frigging an ambitious vaginal scroll
That reads: dear Keith, on second thought…
Form is the language of captors
So write me a letter, I’m feeling sad tonite
Heaving groaner drawn into narrative
Rounding homewards, the bats always come back
The oppression of punctuation without words
Their attack and decay resembles violins
Strummed by the unhurried inquisition of lovers’
Milkswell, untimed
Tightly strung, tighter
Than anxious shores
Calculating an epithet or act
That proceeds, more or less on its own,
To suspend the mean and sleazy,
To precede the day when the rat is on its side
Before the morning watch bends backward for a kiss
From within the milkswell, the rose fire burns;
That is and was a stumbling into position
That burning
Is a model of Helen Adam

II.
This glass is holding only time, the soundless end to it,
Echoes in slow fall leaves,
Dropping motionless, the repetition of a question
The scene of the apartment with all those people in it
The continuum of bone lacquered like an arm chair
Oh heartland television of Missouri, we grovel at your ugly festivals

There is no end to your museum of organized space
In rebellion the virtual sum
Would somehow explain eating metaphor
As onslaughts of matter deteriorate
The most delirious consumed quietly by earthbound branches
Unforgiven crude constructions of this beast

To play or perform the failing
The something monitor sitting down as clothing
An unattached devotion for the young and loving man that the wolf ate
Smuggled into the poem by the salesman of authorship
Undeniably listening as the warm blood welled
Around the steaming legs bitten by jumping music

Where ends the breasts of reckless men
Scraped bundles of fur my lover leaves
Cleaning talons over shallow banks
Of latticed blood around the mouthing action
Of dancing girls and singing boys
Of bats we seek in sheets as if to feed the cat

Think of them despite footsteps falling light
In warping blue industry domestic
The shallow unchanging taste of her kiss
Joke. “Drying sails at dockage:”
Spilling the debt of a savage bed
Where the imagined pedestrian-you turns orange

Bail lily fields of one magnificent prize
Spilling silver from a fountain to a silver screen
As Thomas Culpepper sprang from the crocus
Onto the slanted playground of the dead
Where bone prayer is made payable only
On Halleluiah day

As it flows from thought to ear to tongue
To ear balanced of a christened raving
A partial fallacy adored and dreaded in worship
As the warm math of honeymoon
Lilies dance as they tread
Sinking higher always at the wrong time
Fruition of night beneath a haunted wave
A hungry ghost dreaming in the forest
Lilting rhyme trembled in the absence of meaning
The nectar of the carrion suite restores dissent
In a form that longed for no lover
And obscures nothing of its envy for the bats
The crust of the moon, and mortal wound
Found in the kitchen mixed inside a bowl
Unforgiving of the grizzly dance of their captors
Found drowned return in charge clear
A backward look crawled through a keyhole crack
Elbow notch above a flowering boner
The primitive terror of coeds and kerosene
Caught in a down under looming
A bundle of tantalizing contradictions
Of Baroque nods and looks of explicit knowledge
Permanent as morgue attendants
Lighting skulls secretly behind mirrors
The agony of another heads from the body
To bridge shadow tastes, black slashes in sky
An active flicker in the bone
Reluctance, light of moonless knowledge
Attrition between legs of muscular bodies
Calmed in the meeting space of sleep
Mitigate and shock, restore
Small semblances of truth to the crumbling republic
To the barn, to the crow’s bitter apple
Dropped along the eyelash of the shore
Waves washing over them confidently
Running to the fluid notions of land
Navigating vacancy
Dissolving lines of odors trail among the house
Parting the curtains, for the doll won’t rest

- Joseph Cooper & Andy Peterson