John Phillip
Johnson
Gothic Poem
There's banging in the attic, then groaning,
and while you postulate some natural cause
what you don't know or want to believe
is that your roof has been ripped open
and crows are settling on your stuff, and, if you'd look,
stroboscopic bursts of lightning reveal
strange teen-age-boy-like forms
descending your stairs in long black coats,
black as the ravens they've never seen.
But by then it's too late, and they stomp
over your face and take over your place.
There are hooves inside their tennis shoes
and their knees bend backwards
and their pubic hair covers half their bellies
and they paint their fingernails
black as possible without disappearing
and they want the girls to dress
in yellow dandelions and to believe,
as they operate on them with old tweezers,
they are boys from the neighborhood.
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The Image
The humanification of things.
Like what happened to Rabbits
with Peter, only all the rabbits now,
clever little things, blowing grass reeds
to make their vowels,
lip-smacking it up with the Nietzsche-reading
vegetable patches, so adroit
at sifting the shadow of letters
against the lattice of their chloroplasts.
Even the Man in the Moon
is finally one, his lips moving
through the silence of space,
kissy-kissing the blue earth
when his spinning head faces hers.
Stunned humanity, amazingly crowded, staggers
as they redefine their categories.
Vegans feel like murderers all the time
and try to eat straight from the sun,
himself a grand, winking uncle.
Everything has a face, everything talks.
Even the very stones cry out
the susurrus of the world's conversation –
words, words, words from everything,
the comfortable cacophony
of the brotherhood, the sisterhood,
the thing as a whole.
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