Play “Misty” for Me, Beethoven

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I.

The pure products of America do anal
as the spent end of what once was Europe
waits and wavers, wax on the stem of the Black Pope’s
candle, chalk ghost of the last Neanderthal
bloodline washed from its last daughter’s birth canal
as from a chalkboard or a warehouse floor.
Uterine father – wrist-deep, to the neck – where
do you look when the headlight fills the tunnel? 

II. At The Church of St. Martin in the Fields

The iron cross sunk in thick translucence wobbles,
dilates at the crux, as though before a birth,
a burp – a fetal lurch and loss, glass egg of its own end, fractal
web in a sped and stilled unravel – while a brace
of dozing migrant bums snore against the weary, empty, wooden
pews, a grave bass hum above the lofting choir’s effaced
O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden.
The ship aches beneath its cargo of filth.

III.

The dwindling party dwindles on, and down, and out . . .
“I was a whore in Eyes Wide Shut.”
“I laid my balls on the chopping block.”
“Turned out what I needed was, in truth, pre-teen.”
“I felt it had never really been my cock.”
“I’d started to try choking out when I cut.”
“The preen I preferred was a moral preen.”
The long take lasts until the last light’s shot.

IV.

All day long we watch the rushes. On his back
a horse rolls and rubs his spine against the tired earth,
in the joy of life. O to stay there with him on the aftergrass,
the fog, but the eye’s taken on to the church on fire,
the child nailed headdown to a barn door above the stack
of his raped and gutted sisters, mother, her last embouchure
pursed for an unplayed air, a pair of ravens plied upon pity’s carcass,
the shabbos goy beheaded in the sabbath’s afterbirth.

V.

Light leak leaves on the last frames a white spray, seedfoam
selvage of a moon-churned sea. Love comes in spurts. In droves.
In staves. It’s now: the clear eye shines against the dying year.
Now’s the time to open wide. Either way it’s going to hurt.
Wash down the thousand pints of lint that you’ve consumed,
then piss them out to puddle there, with Mnemosyne in the dirt.
The cold sun’s moving. There there, then. I’m with you here.
Lift your sleeping heavy head, my loves.