Language's Brass Spittoon

- in memory of William S. Burroughs -

Imbibe the dew through swollen catarrhs, awakened

by a poppy that explodes and explodes,

and summon your strength once more from the junk-sick dawn.

I can feel them closing in – the dripping tendrils

for whom I am a turning spit of flesh.

Or a musty bedsheet tossed aside by the sun.

A slick expectorant of clashing metaphors,

desecrating language’s brass spittoon.

But before me is posed a vast et cetera.

An illuminated table of this and that,

charting a central grammar.  A modest

residuum of repeatable characters,

set down in an unadorned font by heavenly

redacteurs – those renewable Hellenes

of being: solar Homer and lunar Plato.

[Previous: Galapagos]

[Next:  My Sobriquet]