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A crack in the ant farm discombobulates the matrix, now tilted, now losing speed.

Cyclops sits at the tip of a chanting pinecone, his archaic inner eye scratched in the emergency.

A local physician, loyal to the mountain’s daughter, signs a prescription in cursive font elegant as a Hellenistic vase.

Enough is enough!

Prepare the shapeshifting wand now a ladder.

Freakshow/Peepshow climb yourself down

into the ruins & rubble of the elementary school.

Tie your shoelaces to a ball & chain.

Throw yourself Freakshow/Peepshow into the pit of echoes.

Into the echoes of a child’s musical instrument!

Farewell to the iron door shielding your heart, bolted shut,

as the elementary school is hit a second time.

Prepare the shapeshifting wand now a falling star.

A falling star remembers Noah gazing into a deep azure sky.

A falling star remembers flash-floods of swirling froth & foam

in diagonal rivers of Gorgon-like rain.

A falling star remembers uncertainty is a certainty & pencils once broken

can never be forgotten.

Prepare the shapeshifting wand now a bird of prey

howling into spinal columns like renegade DNA.

Today is the day of renegade beauty!

A day you never imagined!

A day of what returns to Freakshow/Peepshow, in hubris

like a boomerang, a nemesis engraved upon the karmic wheel.

To shriek! To thrash antediluvian wings!

Today the ill-gained cosmetics curse your indistinct face

in the ruined beauty of the Freakshow/Peepshow

retrospective.

The ever perambulatory William Blake walks to

a bridge ignoring the Museum of Ruined Beauty

Retrospective of the Twenty First Century.

In the Temple of Binoculars a bull pulls a chain collapsing pillars,

perpindicular & askew.

Tin foil rhinoceros & lions cast shadows.

Cyclops, catching his breath beneath slabs of marble,

warning of the mind & psyche collectively disintegrating.

Who & Where & When?

Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep, shoes & the family home.

Freakshow/Peepshow stirs a plastic spoon.

A snake shedding his skin like translucent paper in a birth ritual,

coils in Freakshow/Peepshow’s crown of hair.

Drawn to the bathroom cabinet as if forbidden fruit,

Freakshow/Peepshow testing powders, creams & fragrant sprays.

The family crouches behind a demolished wall.

The instant coffee is gone.

Neolithic hunting parties materialize in the aether,

alive in stone, in bone broth & sound,

asleep for eons in the depths of a pulsating chamber.

Drink of the Original Thought lashing vines & knotting veins.

Drink of the First Principle inscribing lengths of wand-like wood.

Prepare the shapeshifting wand now a whirlwind,

no taller than a heron, speaking in shamanic fits

of rage & grief.

Ash gone white in shamanic fits of shame & disbelief.

& Chanting the ravens’ lucid dreamtime deeply into the cauldron.

& Swirling blood-red poetry casting spells of haunted sound.

What was that? I don’t know. Did you see the hummingbird?

The poison of your fingertips shall touch the graveyard of your face.

Your silhouette staining The Garden Walls of Babylon shall fade as you become

Dorian Gray.

Your silhouette staining The Garden Wall of Golgotha shall fade as you manipulate

a pinhole camera. As you sip sucrose-fructose.

As you recalibrate the diabolical.

Vanish! Banished!

Enough is enough!

A crack in the ant farm discombobulates the matrix, now tilted, now losing speed.

Cyclops sits at the tip of a chanting pinecone, his archaic inner eye scratched in the crisis.

A local physician, loyal to the mountain’s daughter, signs a prescription in cursive font elegant as a Hellenistic vase.

I work on poems for days or weeks after ‘completing’ the final version.

Sometimes I have to leave a stanza ‘in progress’ & return later.