The Flower Undermost
I strut my slow decline with morbid curiosity
assert a cryptic image, bathe in worldly woes.
I learn the swing of writing down the strangest
road myth highway epics, tailgate Bacchanals,
unconscious dune gigs, my folk rubble lost age
flattened beer cans and brand name fossils.No sentimental upside and down before
the stupor, TV humming, I played for time
forestalling trip-tongued wire-heads Ninja clad,
your chrome balls, tattoos and bluish bite marks,
putting off the gloom-girl groupie movement,
sparkling bodies, bells on nipples, rings on lips.The sound of boots on bones and rosebuds,
past-present co-exist in disembodied flowers,
bloom between the glimmers in a vase of inklings.
Wallpaper poets start their opuses on napkins,
suffer rose drooped the club weary mood of
last-round entrapment dark with ice-cube tinkling.Give me raucous colored nights, soul whistled
that began this rose exposed twist of rites,
the white rimmed intensity pinned on torch babes
led through the fire to the fire within hell’s fire,
up the headlong pile of skull and spent clinker,
one still heard above the band’s wild throng.I played for coldness, watched for warmth and
waited for the withered rose reviving meaning,
reached for scales that can’t be measured
in number of thorns or petals or length of stem.
By calling keys to work on sink trap brass
I saw the flower not dreamt arise within,a slender upturned shape, continued survival
hazard, hunchbacked occupation, my addiction
stooped in denial, bound for air and sunlight,
veined and textured to leave an impression,
deep with nectar not connected with pleasure
rosy with seed, but flesh entirely of its own.Twitching, faith-healing, squeezing the shape
from deadly shadows, lightheaded fugues,
the amnion of reconstruction oozes black and oily
till it lengthens into every nook of club-worn actuality.
A loss, a misspent youth, a mysterious wound,
the flowers burn that people toss away too soon.ŠJimmy Warner Design, 2001