Three Poems

Psalm 23

I don’t want to admit it

but I’ve been a bad sheep

for they let me lie down on the sweet lawn

helped me to speechless waters

restored my painful feet

they led me down garden paths that were not ironic

or filled with worrisome garden gnomes

but lit upon the shed of happiness

I’ve walked in death-shade, in night valleys

in paddocks where invariably I was dark

yay! as my niece says sarcastically

and because they followed me I didn’t fear evil

and wasn’t overwhelmed by death

When my thoughts were my enemies

they made reservations in a nice restaurant

and the entire staff obligingly filled my wine trough

picked up my napkin and called me a nice salmon

so when I next catch sight of Marsha and Fred

the two hyperintelligent apes who have shadowed me

with their Etch A Sketch drawings all the days of my life

I shall shake, shake with colossal vigour

disquieting their continuous knob-twisting with my furious hooves

There shall be no never-ending ape-directed silver lining

for my hillock cleaving will be fearsome to both hoggetts and apes

my fleece shall be as a wolf upon my howling spine

and I will dwell in the my parents’ basement of my own self for ever

one wooly shoulder pushed against the mutinous wheel of these, my mutton-fated days

House

There is a man covered in glass on the lawn of a burning house. Soon there are sirens and then ambulances, police, firefighters. Inside the house, three children, a wife, a dog, covered in stab wounds.

They take the family into the forest and turn them into trees. They have dark branches with deep green leaves. The man becomes a river, its cool water flowing over the twisted brown roots of the family.

There’s a bird, a bird with messy black feathers. It flies into town and into the office of the newspaper reporter. Make all stories like this one, it says.

Psalm 91

He that dwelleth in the secret places of the belly shines a mighty light and twists poodles

out of shadow.

I will say my insides have barked their refusal for I have eaten the wrappers of garrulous cattle and my scars lust after rain.

Surely within forty minutes they shall deliver the sneer of the turtledove, dispense excess joy from the noisome duffle bags of stars.

For he has covered thee with his feathers, and under his breath there are wings: his teeth are an encyclopedia-sized dinner which protects you as the jeweled coleslaw protects a deck of cards from bellicose pickle fencing.

Thou shalt not be fried by the flummoxed terriers of night, nor diced by the drumsticks of the day that flieth toward thee like the bittersweet vagina of lawn

Still not by the penis that juggleth chainsaws in darkness and proclaims it was fathered by magma; and also not by the mispronunciations that wasteth the noondog in the Galleria parking lot and offer not a luminous pylon in comfort

Like the green leaves of cash, a thousand shall stride beside the autumnal blastocyst of winter, and ten thousand shall consider their right hand their left and teach their children so; but it shall not draw close as uranium pinking shears upon the foam of thy bathwaters.

Only with nine eyes couldst thou—the eight-eyed—hold and dandle the infant words of the mewling cricketers.

Because thou hast made loud that which was my silent dolphin, my jar that had no mouth and so was the lightbulb where my blind quiet could live and be the Tinkerbell of beaming ducks.

No ladders shall fall over thee, neither shall any beach sand come nigh thy dwelling and fill it with the mirthful and prehensile haberdashery of lifeguards

For he shall make hyperbolic triangles to flutter over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.

And they shall make thy ears into punk airplanes lest thou dash mayonnaise against a stone.

Thou shalt tread only upon the lion and the abacus: the suspenders and the answering machine emerge like a trump card from the silken slit of twilight in which thou ask to travel first class

Because he hath set his dove upon me, therefore will I make a shopping cart of tongues: I will set alight a paper bag upon a nimbus of square waves because he hath made it snow my name all over the parking lot and in cursive.

He shall call upon me as the antidote upon the phone booth and I will answer him as the lucid stapler and the breath of moths herd the ardent buffalo of the cruise ship: I will be with him in trouble; I will be as saliva on the migrating oak, an orange on the bad boy of gladness.

With long life will I satisfy him and throw away my tiny shoes.