Crown for a Natural Disaster

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Tonight I’m too stupid to write a poem.
Who knows what poetry is.
I know:
My voice is too pronounced.
My pronoun I is a needless gnome.
I fall asleep in the spelling quiz
and sink to the shipwrecks in fathoms below.
On the Titanic mosses grow.
The moon has been renounced
and burning tigers pounce
right off the Golden Gate.
Your poetry must obfuscate
or end up middlebrow.
Madonna says take a bow.

Madonna says stop
and strike a pose.
Michael says don’t stop
‘til you get enough.
In developing nations I adopt
my very own vogue.
Let’s drop
the corset and the bullshit. I lop
off the ear of a Roman soldier. He’s tough,
but doesn’t call my bluff.
Jesus, however, is perfectly clear.
Knock it off, Amanda dear!
Sorry! I call.
I’m not sorry at all.

Sorry for the sentiment
oozing from my gums.
So spring’s return is little matter.
Hyacinth is trite.
New York grows great peppermint;
bartenders muddle it in rum.
I try to gather
the glassware they shatter.
Tonight I’m too stupid to fight
any angels. I’m erudite,
but I don’t want to wrestle.
Tonight I cook meth with a mortar and pestle.
I’m cleaning up glass with an oily broom.
Titanic chains creak in deep-sea gloom.

Into deep-sea the submarine sinks.
Beneath the sharks,
far past the coral.
Where fish with teeth and lightbulbs wait.
Tigers leap like lemmings off the brink.
Lights snuff out in this dark
water. But I mean no moral.
I mean no quarrel.
I watch for jumpers at the Golden Gate.
It’s not too late;
come down from there.
I have hyacinth to laurel your hair –
She yells, We’re just quarks in quantum slaughter!
I’m no longer anyone’s daughter!

Daughters of the revolution camp out in the square.
Into the desert plaza scarabs
crawl at request of Sunni kings.
Kings fidget. Kings preen. They oil
their wings. The Gulf corsairs
make music on strings. The United Arab
Emirates sends in tanks and brings
in troops. It’s boiling
in the Gulf, but Dubai’s royal
for vacation. I’m loyal
to the Palm Islands myself.
They’re built out of a coastal shelf.
You can swim in a sea of margaritas.
Madonna coos isla bonita.

Bonita Applebum, god bless you girl,
bowlegged. What a strong-ass walk.
Kindly fuck off. If I am blessed
it’s not in the ass.
If anything it’s that I’ve snuck past whirl-
pool and demon, rock
in straits. With only one arrest
to my name! But have I stressed
that females are the ship-eating caste?
Homer wrote Scylla and Charybdis dames. At last
the west is crystal clear.
The blood-orange tiger flaunts its rear.
In the jungle they’re judging who’s best dressed.
An Amazon lops off her breast.

About breasts the west has plenty to say.
This poem is the tits.
This poem’s Marilyn Monroe.
This poem is a hunting pack after virgin boobs.
Callooh! Callay!
Crawfish and grits!
White pin-up girls for Cleaver on death row.
What jury of peers? This is fathoms below.
Down here I’m in a pensive mood.
In diving bells, there’s little food.
And there I go spouting on I again.
The fish down here make lousy friends,
despite their little luminescence.
Their jagged teeth are deep-sea lessons.

Miles down in deep-sea, the Pacific plate
moves. One inch alters.
Maybe two.
Such quiet.
Up from the ocean floor the hate
roars. 10,000 go missing in the water.
Japan is screaming. What to do.
Twenty bucks to the Red Cross. What else is new.
Tonight I’m too stupid to start a riot.
Bartenders offer booze. I’m inclined to buy it.
We’re cleaning up gas in a nuclear room.
Fukushima leaks a nuclear gloom
all over Miyagi. It’s death to oysters.
For twenty miles out, people are cloistered.

Nuns in cloisters pace the halls.
Nuns in Lazio make ancient wine.
How else to keep out the twenty-foot waves?
How else to not drown in the eyes of God?
Shut the A/C vents in your walls.
Don’t touch that laundry on the line.
Tokyo officials relay how to behave
in radioactivity. The nave
of the nuns gives a nod
to Mary. Virgin broads
aren’t half as scary
as Greek monsters, tentacled, hairy.
Please stay inside, per government request.
Radioactivity will eat your breasts.

This poem is radioactive.
This poem wears orange peels
in its hair and drapes onion skins
around its shoulders. Tear gas
is repelled by citric acid.
This poem is a free Shiite beneath a boot-heel.
This poem in my mouth is gin
and ague and sin.
Before the last
rooster crow I’ll deny my master.
This poem three times before dawn.
Turn me on.
My bed glows in the dark.
It radioacts beneath the sharks.

A shark smells my blood.
A paper cut
on the poem leaves DNA.
I came all the way from a single cell
organism to doughnut
around parking lots, uppercut
pals. I dismay
my instructors. I decay
into carbon. I tap on hell’s
door and ask Lucifer’s pardon. In hell
I house-sit when the devil’s out.
The devil pouts,
You seem to like that religious stuff.
Like it? Don’t stop til you get enough.

Don’t stop this poem.
With its hyacinth hair.
Spring through the window and ash
in the air after buildings collapse.
Where the buffalo roam.
Oh give me a bear
where the bull markets crash.
This poem of panache
is a gateau topped with too much ganache.
Jesus claps
me on the back.
Hey look. If you come around,
bolster your brothers. From the ground
I look up. I’m a white tiger rug.
I’ll be worn on the head of imperial thugs.

The imperial head
appears on TV.
The emperor never
descends from his cloud.
But now that his cirrus-bed
glows in the dark, he’s pleased
to come down. The weather
is right. Feather-
light snow. The proud
head takes a bow.
A fracture
cracks the red circle. A rapture
steals the faithful away.
This hunting poem. Callooh! Callay!

Madonna says take a bow.
I bow. I’m not sorry at all.
Titanic chains creak in deep-sea gloom.
On a broom I’m no longer a daughter.
Madonna coos for the crowd,
an Amazon having a ball.
Her jagged teeth are deep-sea lessons.
Madonna in the cloisters. Go to confession
or radioactivity will eat your breasts.
It radioacts beneath the sharks.
Like it? Don’t stop til you get enough.
We’ll be worn on the head of imperial thugs.
This hunting poem. Callooh! Callay!
This tiger poem getting away.