Words with Images

Loose-limbed and languid
voluptuous squid
slid slowly by seaweed
and more slowly hid.
with thoughts of millennial mercantile schemes
amounting to nothing but opium dreams.

Apes weep but leap from tree to tree,
leap from tree to tree
(but me I’m free to see them not);
the great-beaked birds in herds make skreaks
(while I agog hear only fog).
Arachnids hide in holes ignored
we -- we dare to fare into the air aloft – and gone.

Yearly the killer bees yaw and romp
through the golden filigree of printemps.
Like opals and carbuncles dewy and light
that ravish the soul at the very first sight,
confusing their victims, occluding their might.
Soon their prey will sink in a swoon.
These oligolectic bees buzz up a tune
of garnet greens and things unseen,
a hermit’s eye, leanest of all the Essenes,
a hermit’s eye, leanest of all the Essenes.

Hopping the freighter bound for below
Daniel and Emrys and Ethan and Joe
stowed all the cargo and gobbled shad roe.
The hold was so cold that they all fell quite sick
but avoided Beelzebub’s grasp with a trick.
When he came with the aim to seize on to their souls,
they feinted and flung him to sulfurous coals.
So Daniel and Emrys and Ethan and Joe
7jiu-jitsued that japer their underground foe,
then exited up as if shot from a bow
and returned to their monkeys in Mohenjo-daro.

Under the counterpane’s tropical heat
it’s torrid and humid down under the sheet
where natives go naked and nuzzle at will
down each damp valley, up each fertile hill.
We’ve sailed past the Cape, we’re rounding the Horn,
we’re starboard of Cancer below Capricorn!

Aleister Crowley announced a grand fête
in his pharmaceutical phantasy land
where tight-laced Edwardian dope dealers met
and danced to the tune of the Bag O’ Bones Band.
These hopheads were bopping and called out for more
till their nerves all shut down and they fell on the floor,
a great heap of satyrs with faces like flies
all tangled in gaiters and braces and ties.

The early earthworm twisted his tail
and glistened his part that was glad to be male.
Vermicular lust began to rise
when the male part caught sight of his feminine side.
Before the morning was halfway done:
a hermaphroditical orgy of one.

The dog days run on
like a viscid elixir,
and steam mounts up to the brain.
I’m feeling so languid,
can’t feel the heart stir
like the long-dead fen-buried Dane.
I’ve the drive of an aphid
I never will thrive,
but, only, if only, could I only gain
a hypothetical prosthetic pain
at least, at least, I’d know I’m alive.