Two Poems

 Flyting the Honeybee

You gaffe your way in the sunblasted door

a hero smuggled in August’s haycart.

You spend all morning buzzing about rooms

and their particular arrangements of furniture

and the smells of the light the particular arrangements hold.

You con industriousness into thinking

it is a boiled dog under afternoon’s stoop.

I hear your colony is collapsing, flowerhugger,

flowerfucker, flowerbedwrecker,

but here you are, dancing directions

to the nearest brothel, intruding with precision

on the divine chore of human being.

Shouldn’t bees know well what bees they wish

to find at their mighty feasts?

Truly do we live in a cash-for-golden age:

honeybees make perfect, unlike poets, assassins

constant on that one last mission, pregnant

with their own grisly unmaking, delivering

with a thrust of the sound engineer’s shiiing

it. Shame extrudes through seppuku

the shaped charge of a suicide thong.

Slur no rites over the diminishment of the bee

elliptical thoughts dotting to her eventual stop.

Know that in your absence a mischievous giant

fur-heaped shapeshifting god-thing is finding

and eviscerating your comb, smoke venting

from the nozzles in its fingertips, yellow gore

unwiped from the crooks of its mouth.

Hop, Skip, Jump

Andy Verboom's poem, "Hop, Skip, Jump" was presented as a special pdf supplement that has not been archived.