PROLOGUE


What uses poetry?
Disparate bridges?
Reverberating rotunda?
Languishing logic?
The heaving deck
of midnight's wreck?
Laudanum's purse?
The falling timbers
of an angel's curse?
Your labia pressed
against my breast?
The heart's arrhythmia?
Liquid's burns?
The drowning's tears?
The brain's demise?
The body's chemise?
The soul's surmise?
History's premise?
The grasping breath?
The funeral wreath?
Resistance's light?
Academe's cul-de-sac?

What uses poetry?
Corrugated bowsprits?
Unexpergated tundra
vanquishing to brick
the watch's check?
Poseidon's beck?
The sirens' lures?
The distant shore's
raucous cures?
Innocence blessed?
The unwanted guest?
Vibrating clitoris?
The will to power
winter's despair?
Executive's directives?
Legislature's electives?
Judiciary's correctives?
The 4th estate's invectives?
Merchants of death?
The thundering heath?
Faith's bells?
Children's labors?
Women's birthings?

What uses poetry?
Cavernous kisses
dressed in genitalia
brandishing to quick
the queavy lick
gagging and sick?
The rosy canker
of desire's languor?
Haunted hangovers
spinning the crest
of an image's rest?
Numbing algia?
The strength of the poor?
The patient's store?
Glory's aggregate
tacking the strait
of obscurity's agate
escaping the gate
to the swelling depths?
Ignoring debts?
The oncoming swells?
The stateless waves?
The becalmed days?

Oh! My brothers! My sisters! Oh! My soul! How you sunk in oblivion
only to rise in your lamplit eyelids upon the wings of the muse!


--David Joseph