Imbolc

O if only the Etruscan horseflies of my words
would constellate in the aether, sequestered from
the plangency of wing'd gekkos! I see
the shadowship and its crew of evilborn

stethoscopes hurdle the Great Wall of China
like a blacktop cat who nightly lugs a horsewhip
up a stairwell slimed with swastikas, spooled
out by a sawtoothed moon in slacks of static

who daily cadges Janus-faceless coins
from a stashbox erstwhile resounding with oceanroar,
now squiggled with saxophones like a vast gizzard
in which I descry, by torchlight, headless skulls

eating jazz pastries off tectonic plates.
O if only I could be the quickdarting angel
girt about with runnels, the dolphinchrist
snooded up with fog! I hear the clappers

clanging in toothless maws; I see the ben was
bulging from eyecaves. Flung off the spinning spiderweb,
the tightrope walker shatters the floe, disclosing
oakgrained sky. Scattered over the starfish

cartwheeling on the sodden garbagedump,
over the streetlamp orchard, over the shanties
dancing to an undersea harmonica,
the shards glitter like sloughed-off diamondback skins.

I see a coffee shop shaped like a stormcloud shaped
like a homburg under which a pocketwatch
nailed to the shadow of a cross reads 13 o'clock.
O if only a poem would ascend from my coffee's vortex

and fare forth into the mist of knucklebones!