Ode to Sardines                                              

At first, the word sardine slipped from a drawer of my brain to sink into a sea of scribbles

because it rhymes with martin.  Ungrateful to these noble fish of the family

Clupeidae, I forgot they had saved me from horrendous headaches and deadline agony.

Deaf to their request for recognition, I ridiculed and abandoned them in a stanza.

Enamored with a Texan, butterfly balconies, whippoorwills and a silver toothpick, I 

forgot the sardines until I reached a slump in vocabulary, unable to formulate 

grabbing titles.  I needed someone to perform therapy on my ears: Roethke would

have been perfect because he gave his students a love for the sound of language,

indeed.  What if I had been cursed by a school of angry sardines from the Arabian Sea,

jailed into my own dumbness for underestimating the power of young pilchards

kept into their beat role of food for birds, sharks, sea lions, seals, whales and humans?

Little did I know about this plankton-eating fish who graciously lent me its name

many times after it had inspired painters, poets, game inventors, and ruthless conquerors.

No, I did not know that Punta la Marmora is the highest point of Sardinia as I read

O’Hara’s words “you have SARDINES in it” or “Where’s SARDINES?” and found them

peculiar yet understood the idea of the poem as a chronicle of the creative art.

Quoi de plus naturel! I told my bedroom wall from under the sheets, sunk into my pillow,

read until my eyes hurt and my brain clicked and clicked again.  Once more,

sardines had saved me, motivated me, inspired me, really.  Overwhelmed  with joy, I

thanked my fate for having made a moonfish of me in this Arabian sea of words.

Under such a promising influence, I surfed the Net, entered the universe of the sardine,

visited young Queen Elizabeth and Margaret at their Little Thatched House,

Welsh people’s gift to the royal princesses, noticed they went wild playing sardines.

Exhilarated with my founding, I kept searching, bumped into Bob Kaufman.      

Yes, his Golden Sardine had been sitting on top a library shelf for fifteen long years,

zapped out of sight, silenced by a drunken linguist, who can speak butterfly.
 

Pataphysics                                                     

After we spotted a golden pizza in the sky above our duplex, Mimi yelled, That’s amore!

because when the moon hits your eye like a Broadway show, forget the broadside ballads.

Ciào, I’ll drink myself numb, nun, run from penultimate têtes à claques, not Cuitaláhuac, 

dance in la città delle donne until, smick-smack, smick-smack, Marcello on roller skates,

enthralled with an enlisted chick whose name is not Eleanora in Bantu or Cushitic, calls 

Freud’s daughter to the rescue.  Friends, free consultation by Anna and banana take out.

Gerod believes that everything happens for a reason, like, what’s the reason for cruelty,

huh?  I’ll have my students ponder this question after they turn in their sardine essay

in Italian for our English class.  After all, I have a reason, season, bison, a tritone of sort.

Juxtaposition of meanings into indecipherable layers or lawyers stacked under Minnie’s 

Karakul skin, a sin, or a sign to volunteer for karaoke.  Banzai!  I’ll have another saké.  

Languid language won’t make the cut in this poem.  I might as well shell langoustines,

moonshine atop Mount Everest, steal the first Kandinsky’s giant mobile I see at sea,

nosedive into Dr. Snowski’s imaginary universe, or honk.  The letter O is coming soon

: Oink to das Kapital that enslaves us to materialism, consumerism, barbarism and green

plague.  On its way to America, the specter of communism sneezed and turned green too. 

Quarantine is not the solution.  Think quantum theory, quenelles de brochet, pikestaffs

raised toward a red firmament, and nasal spray.   Flonase knows Kitty Lolo, who does not

speak Lolo and dances half-naked to soothe the pain in Simon-san’s sore feet.  Twisted

text:  Replacing a casual acquaintance with an ordinary daughter does not make a son.

Unnilhexium, unnilpentium, unnilquadium, unnilseptium: not unnumbered, out of order

variation on transuranic elements in a red college dictionary.  I say,     Diction, Harry,

without exception, exemption, ex-champion, for it is a malediction, a curse of the pizza

extraordinaire when Amore turns out to be a fraud, a farmer, a Fassbinder as Fox.  Yes,  

yesterday, Carrie’s husband fell from the sky like a heavy drop of rain.  She held him

zipped up in her vinyl purse and ran to the store to buy a box of ziti, the bride’s macaroni.
 

Operatics                                                             

Axe me not, ex-Me, bourgeoise turned intellectual, go ask the fox about rabid elitism

bites at birth, which are no lullabies, wallabies with bees, babies on trees, but wannabes

creed.  Nobility of mind is a matter of curls, crooked follicles, wooden combs, mousse-

de-luxe, a determination to display hellacious hairdos based on helixes and frosty hair

elegantly accessorized with a classical look, book, me-crook, hook to the breakfast nook,

: fortuitous raisin lips to tow him in my undertow with undertones of compassion, try

God, MDMA, hummus, G-stein, or what have you but a girlfriend turned chimpanzee,

hamadryas baboon, bonobo, worse, a girl gone bonkers for a hammer and hamburgers.

I am tempted to surrender to Apollo, his world of dreams and appearances, give up

juggling feats of joy and terror, lose myself into the veil of Maya, but I’m claustrophobic,

King Mackerel, and I need a good kinnikinnick whiff to cheer me up with its tobacco

leaves and bark mixture, or I’ll compose a one-woman duet without ol’ Dio intoxication

Merlot, Merlin, magic whatchamacallit hat, and cuite à la yack, a debauchery of words,

no Nahuatl, Javanese, gibberish, or obi-dobi, please, for syntax is wounded and shall die

on this O line.  Long live, Saint Ox.  The detox is born of reign and drink Roottea we pop 

plenty of sensual root dandelion mixed with burdock and ginger cruel mist into roots.  

Question to our quack culture:  Is Artaud momo when he writes,  Written poetry is worth

reading once, and then should be destroyed ?  Sound option:  Henri Chopin’s Licences.

Spit in the fire, O Great Snafu, know the ephemerality of  words and speak butterfly

to this poet who will sing to demonstrate that she is not dizzy with her own presence                                                                              

Une poule sur un mur, qui picote du pain dur, picoti, picota, lève la patte, puis s’en

va before the snake, shaken by this commotion, slithers his way down to the henhouse

where the New Millennium Farmers Colloquium (NMFC) discusses GENERATION-

X AND PHARMACEUTICS: METONYMY, METAPHOR, AND MASTIGOPHORAN.

Yokefellow, yank on the trope twice and expect a synecdoche to drop down in a jiffy.

Zut alors, I forgot the fox and zonked out with zydeco, zucchini, and Zarathustra.

Hermeneutics                                                      

Almsmen, abjure nature for a day, abide by the andante slip of fingers on a letter A, 

believe in Agrippina as a Parisian hiatus who tries ahimsa on hicks, aikido on dogs,

catechism without answer, Massive Attack cabaletta, then discovers the taste of tears

deposited at Gala’s mouth, a devious delight for dent de lion diversionist lost at land. 

Encapsulated L-theories, hypodermic heroines, drive-by humming ballads, choke me--

FRAU MCCULLERS,  IL FAUT TRAVAILLER A AIMER OU AIMER TRAVAILLER!

Godard dares passion, my daughter is a hamster tamer, and I type words on a screen 

: Henotheists dwarf high priests, lavaliere microphones dance around marabous

in swallow suits, genuine crudeness grabs goblins at noon as I wake up in her dreams,

jaundiced, a bee without stripes.  O hendiadys, do not rise with a headache and terror.

Kudzu grows out of Gala’s skin, feeds hairy beats, restrains her Inaugural Gooseflesh-- 

Limousine, take us to a limnetic shack where flames keep matrimony buzzing,

mother and daddy-longlegs smoking smack.  I plead, Canonize me or smite my womb,

Nero, but he hands me down to Handel for an opera.  Dehumanized by love, he burns 

ostriches at Circus Maximus, opens the gate on our nothingness, catches a twitch.

Picture shells on clock: Time to pack for Paris, watch prowlers move like assassin bugs,

quaff sex, and stave off romance.  Tipsy with toreutics, we embody illuminations, 

reproduce copper rock, corrosive fires, thick pigments, silver threads, bedlamites.  

Serenity punctuates Eros’s infamies with stroboscopic flashes of mantras at dusk

: Transfixed by a plethora of Om, he salutes my scorn with silence, stargazes at Gala,       

unfledged, uneasy, opaque.  TURN UP MY SYMPHONY!  O pickle, cripple my heart,

vacuum my senses, vaporize my tears, vanish into a variable star, a ghost of Spica. 

When commerce translates into palming The Visage of War stickers off onto my child, 

xenogeny aborts before its scheduled flight aboard Nero’s degenerative behemoths.

Yokel, yodel sound as a yo-yo until laryngitis stretches your neck into lasagna layers

zapped out of flavor by Gala’s caustic emanation from Song of the Broken Giraffe.

Tectonics                                                     

A pinch of amitriptyline sprinkled over alfalfa quiche flings Albion into alpha rhythm,

bliss, blitz, Brittania’s blather on blinis as she cups her hands toward clouds of crème

Chantilly for the charlotte and faints from dejection.  O endometriosis, you know

divas detest narcotized nerds and menstrual cramps on Sunday evening before the ciné. 

Esoteric esperance is escape from estaminets, needles, and dangling modifiers as Using

forceps, Oothoon’s emotions were severed from her larynx to press her to speak sensibly. 

Gibberish forbidden, no sensuous statement allowed during coffee, toasts, morning paper,

Harper’s Magazine, and allegro mol to appassionato.  This charmingly pathetic stalemate

interpolates my insecurities while Gunter kisses my ankle, and out of the most intense

joy, the scream of terror or the yearning lament for an irreplaceable loss sounds forth

: KRAKEN!  KRAKEN!  But a Norwegian Sea monster is not worth a kopeck in Kansas

lest it grows feet, slips on a Balinese geometric robe, dances the story of phonetics,

mimes the evaporation of the sound S in Arkansas, confuses Bromion, and ululates.

Neophyte, turn to Blake, find a cosmological egg that scrambles your wits and sucks

ostracism out of your brain.  O acrid flavor of unsettlement, put on a coat of kabala. 

Patience is the plat du jour, but my intestine pickets without juices to deter indigestion,

quantizes the worth of virtues, and screams for Theo’s eagles to rend away my partition.

Rintrah roars from the forge, and the whippoorwills drop the sound S on Texas.  Ask

squeamish senators about split infinitives before the sardine casserole à la Vichyssoise

tournament, shout obscenities to dry roots, and study systemic emotional constipation

underlaid with absence of worth.  Nobodaddy, hoot for Oothoon, not for emanations

vanished and reborn without visceral needs for viscous affection.  A Parisian wife in wig 

would wear Theo out, drive him back to his cave, his garden with minimal irrigation,  

xenophobia, and anacoluthon like You make me--I can’t force you.  Salut, Gunter,

yield to the poet before the veil of desolation forces shadows upon you.  She cooked

zebrafish curry with zeal and let you unzip her boot before you played the fandango.