Mark Sargent

RUNNING MEAT & GALAXIES OF SEED

Lost track, the nations traversed

blurred to a lagooned island where

not skin but razor wire caressed

into four figures of the Xristo

a Da Vinci anatomy rendered Guantanamo

BEWARE: DO NOT APPROACH THE WORK

or fail to eat those

gaps in the unutterable

so he set the Thames on fire,

filled his emptiness with burning water,

lungs by Turner by way of Pollock,

city by Richard Serra.

T turns and says, You see, I was raised by wolves.

V nods, Civil servants here.

School teachers.

Farmer.

Genius rodents in livery.

By ‘continuity’ I imply a certain elasticity,

she said, our attention probes pliability,

a short puncturing of parameters

through visual massage.  Her fingers worked

the space before us, a hysteric priest

with the body of heist.

T insists, I was raised by wolves.

The conversation autopsy reveals

that all was prologue, spaz-zap nickel & lime

spun out fine as vanishing rain

jackdaw beak

prudence worms souvlaki’d with spent Bics

arranged hollow-savior-fashion

knuckle peelings in jars

arranged by crones in leotards

AND THE VEGETABLE WORLD SEEPED THROUGH

Wolves, I tell you, and they were all

deeply into Marc Chagall

and the old joke about Zionist tourniquets.

Skin of drum, trickle of insect escape from the ear,

each bug a false memory, a betterment, a lie lozenge

acrobated by tongue to facilitate the rewrite.

Opposing forces pushing into the shape of face,

yours or the nomenklatura lining up for

sprinkles of smoked sturgeon on

a hard rye dissident,

a smudge of mustard

and the envy of neighbors

stretching till the cows get lost.

There are lists and this is one.

Not a ‘who gets what’ but a

‘what is done to whom’ a

‘not why but when’ a

‘in case of emergency break first’

the heads of the undecided.

But I was raised by wolves.

Eleven heads turn to ask, And?

They licked my bum till it was clean.