The Beasts Unknown
After all those years
of spitting out rivers of blood and teeth
and defiant is-that-all-you-gots,
After all those years
of watching hope after hope catch fire
and dance off with the smoke of cigarettes and trains,
After all those years
of bad sex and unmet gazes
and trembling hands full of pills,
It is strange now to recline
on the lap of the Elephant God
with my womb full of acorns and wolves.
Language pours from my face like Dublin rain
forming oceans of ineffable objects.
I am surrounded by white flamingoes.
The Beasts Unknown will come when I call,
from tunnels and overpass shadows,
from underneath the beds of small children,
from behind the unspeakable desires of housewives,
leaving footprints which sprout sawdust dandelions
and tooting clarinet stalks.
The Beasts Unknown will shamble forward
on mismatched limbs with creaking brass joints,
and their voices will sound like cyclones of bones.
They will kneel before the Elephant God
and their sweet sweat will fill the air with bubbles.
The Beasts Unknown will receive instructions and set out
putting cracks in hard things and holes in soft things,
squirming like earthworms through the dense minds of men,
putting stones in the mouths of smarmy lectors,
burying dead thoughts and replacing them with moonlight,
decorating trees with sun dried symbols
and pieces of church organ wrapped in wires
and the skulls of the demons that we’d worshipped in our own skulls.
Bits and pieces of the old ceiling will vanish,
like a puzzle in reverse,
and the blue, blue sky will shine through.
I caress the conch shell in my hands.
I feel a kicking inside my belly.
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If you liked this, check out my book of poems and illustrations. Here’s an interview I did about it.
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