Inner Anatolia
Tough to tell how it was. “Fates Worsening,”
the sellsword’s shortcut, teetered on humming
trestles out Mithridates’ bloviate throat.
These sorely mistaken squires! Like they know
a newsworthy name for wind.
Like they’d bellow.
Coinage, a thin, stately idea!
His thumbworn visage, circuitous
and tactful, sufficiently potent
that all fastness hadn’t a choice
but to inflate to accommodate
the enormity of his yearners’ fee.
None other now prevails here
in Inner Anatolia. Its game of Not
Rupturing lives in its way by Dis-
obeying Pressures. Not that
extra Anatolias stay germane; they don’t.
Pronoia
Too proud for medicine, None-of-It
pauses to mark the heat-warped
bookcase quease, then scats. So he is
sickened, all four his characteristic
flipped-centipede braids in atrophy,
so unsteady of diaphragm his piss
schisms. Melted milk chocolate,
slurped en-ferret without exempting
himself from a distaste for the chew.
Persnickety None wants the Chief
Flummox before he kicks buckets,
fine: the bashful, the unaccountably
great-souled, starquake ennoblement.
Among soups and satrapies he seeks,
informs, regrets, persists like a palace
fire in a blizzard. Or, uh, one of its lit
windows. He sets in. Not a quiet
death, but yea, a necessary. Not even
the slug speaks, though it’s easy to tell
a slug (little guy, big heart, no?). Yes,
the sun, everyone’s brother. Berries
on strings. Derby ridicule. None,
try and get some sleep. It’s just you
that holds your own head in hand,
you roofless temple looming somehow
up. Your tight, gak tension, as that
between puddles and mosquito roe.
Cresting. Eyes crowning, difficultly
consenting to tough-to-sculptitude.
Too proud, journeyman. Too impressed.
With the Deities
By curious means, Sirs,
I have spied what will
come to be the Great
Red Spot. It treads like
my lynx, once a jewel
belonging to the Chinese
Dowager Empress.
Roundly clocks it, a
Sanskrit out the Jovian
aerials. Its jade temper my
children have come to hate.
Ah Sirs, what do we with
the deity’s gimcrack?
Speak we the cats’ brogue?