Exhumation In The West — After Burial In the East
I work days within a gurgling Charybdis,
amongst laborers, learners, cadavers, cremations
of dreamers and hopefuls beaten into damp submission.
Before my station pass the terrible Anxious,
sounding their rusted windpipes and their mangles,
clamorous and indignant and delicate — they hiss
through the mandibles of colored and stained yearnings,
what agony, what limbic rancor;
the corpus’ endogenous monotony
in the marrow and bone of the rib cage.One question of self, beyond the guise of gums,
and their throats, clogging up or preparing some monstrous suppression,
will whirl away burning, their tongues and their lips aflame,
their mineral disguises will swell over their hearts,
and ossify like a slab of petrified wood —
the smothering of a hearth lighted by a forebear
who warmed the black night in mirth, but whose scion
lies now ossified, a vanquished organism.
