"...These existences,
Won from the elements, and of a life
Unknown, nor bounded by the days of ours,
Cannot regain estate and order in
The evermoving orbit and weird dance
Of spirits whence they fell; which, while mine eye
Detains them, desperate, is beyond the verge
Ethereal and inexorable revolves
Careering thro' the spheres."

--Balder


    CANTO III. ("Carbon Dioxide")

Snapshots in my last album
i who have nothing
cling to. A pretty dream grown putrid
and not MacGyver with a cunning hairpin
can fix. Kiln
of Keatsian vase-reveries, false hostage
to another black solstice,
on zedonk
i make my tardy way, whose gospel
flickers deceitful
lightnings afar, i trow. What torment
else? Daily vampire
staved with month
after month, off; same chutney
you make of my scoffing jags and my sacred
precincts--papier mâché seven-eighth
scale--Champs-Élysées rouble--:
poem-kumquat
plucked. But will tomorrow's villagers salvage?
Ride then the zebra.
What does not change. Code topaz
and a kind of test, and a kind of gauntlet
snirps the sylph
Yggsdrasill ivy
-licious, standing where it fell, emblem
unsomber
in the kumquat poem.
Kimchee from backyard cabbage
born at Auschwitz, yet can imagine
else, which is puzzling in a fuzzy sculpture
Cthulhu mulcts.
As i dine, bird hordes fractious
with journeying, gabble. Box asp'rin
and a saffron sky, hoür of the aardwolf
gather difficult
concords, some of them rather swarthy
than not. Low, spiralling ticktock irony
fastens the unknown proverb
my envy
and my despair, twelfth
of Nevermind: you reach a doldrum
only decay sculpts
and from that moment the close sable jaguar
your shadow, plants in aspic
its hoodlum.


"...That underflow and subterrene
Wherein the future heaves, and time to come,
Like an embowelled earthquake yet unbelched
Disturbs our world, is mine."

--ibid