Poem XXXIV: No news

But in the end
headlines can give no peace

even the one you have waited for
exactly all your life

is merely one more
improvisation
another inconclusive
experiment in death

similarly that email, or tweet,
for which your ass has been holding its breath

it will leave you scrounging around
your wilderness of wasted flesh
with nowhere
any
fucking
refresh

Poem XIX: Infans piger

I was a slothful infant, desiring only

to eat and play
though sometimes I dreamt up
complicated acts of sabotage
and sometimes conjured up 
savage forms of justice
out of nowhere
which gave rise to a Satanic sense
of injured merit
which I was far too well-fed to enact
and lazy

I am not sure what went wrong there
but it is hard to wake up
from that kind of contentment

it is hard to stop killing snakes in your bed
it's hard to stop slapping lions

Poem XII: Warning from the Grail Hermit

Warning: few meanings are spiritual
in the literal sense of the word.

You can see through transparent symbolism

the details twist together

to form a bloody spiral.

Orthodox? Nay:

arising from the damaged memory

of an aureate demigod

are the things it rescued from oblivion:

things cut from the papers

and blogs usurping love and reason

a square of cloth, a sweet emulsion

retaining forged a physiognomy,

or else a misplaced spear, a bowl of blood.

(The hermit crashes into the wood

running through the night in crazy clothes

stomach crammed

with  voles and mice and nightingales

and unspecific bits of cloth

never to be seen or heard from again.)