Because a Black Snake Is Crawling in My Room

Because a black snake is crawling in my room
Because a black snake is crawling
Because a black snake is crawling in
The mouse-maze of my gaze, shall extraterrestrials
Launch fireballs at the yowling accordion?
Java is ceremoniously defiled,
For such is the edgy charm of windmills
Reclining on a drift of porkpie hats
Which bleed umber, haunted by acorporeal
Slivers. Purple. The aforementioned yinyang graffito.
The paranoid schizophrenic surrounded on all sides
By gonghives, and a crocodile named Tallulah Bankhead
Scurrying down the path to the dream harbor,
Tufts of grassy masts.
Fingers of cigar smoke
Pounding harpsichord arpeggios; willows dancing.
Soma exuberance, critter nookie.
Shards of ice pay mind for the cold-water cave.
The rasping of imaginary rivers
Against the asteroid sounds like your surname,
Underwear. Immersed in a tincture of opium
And moody music, Oz shrivels, tumbles
Ass-over-Tea Party into sleep. Dissolve.
The lighthouse-keeper’s bondage collar
Humming. The abominable snowman
Popping a wheelie, dissolving his razorblade
In the lowlands of lacemakers’ doldrums;
Crones poised on the edge of a leaf;
A wormblood hookah poised on the edge of a nuthatch.
We damn well want our cobwebs lustrous and smooth
And slinky, our etchings of abattoirs aglow.
The big-ass polliwog, the shear tearer of it all.
Sybarites loll in slush, restless as boot-
Tongue subs; chrome-browed dynamos
Swirl in the sky, eye-boinking. Stamp collection.
Childlike Geiger counter genuflecting,
Cannibalized with. Judgment Days, clockhands
Fandango in the sanguine forest. The troll skull
Guffawed while being crucified on a bleary
Hilltop, certain a Sioux butterfly would swoop
Down to rescue him. My secret is a red woman.
The clouds—white leaves I brought home from the sea
And stored in the alley—aren’t passionate about
Anything. I pity the lonely dog
Barking and barking and barking and barking and barking,
And I see a skid row beside the sea, the bums
Sky-colored shadows, and I hear
Enormous church bells tolling in outer space.
Your coiffure mounts a horse and gallops over
The rainbow to a parallel universe.
“Maturity means to rediscover the seriousness
One had as a child at play.” Nietzsche.
Strange to find elephants here, in this northwestern
Wilderness—elephants with ears serrated like leaves,
Riding blue frogs down Grove Street to the valley
Where Juliet Cokespoon and Ruth Ratpoison
Batten on the flesh of chessmen and weep
Sawed-off microscopes. Imagine: imagine
Green cats and talking barnowls, bracelets of
Hermits’ hair in the tinfoil sky, thoughts
Like lily-pads on which crows alight.
As I sat on the throne of God, beautiful girls
Moaned through cracks in their green eggshell skin.
Because a black snake is crawling in my room,
Innumerable suicided cigarettes embark
On a magic carpet which chuffs like a train into
The greenhouse where a pinstriped psalm is kissing
The bulldozer’s llama-spattered nipples. And brainwaves
Inundate the verandah where blue stars
Coalesce to form a skull-and-crossbones
Which whispers a warning to the stranger: “Avoid
At all costs—Oh, hi!”