I Am As You Are Anything by Mark Sargent
PERMEATION
An engine of mewling words
chugged up the steep hill of a day
our lives had purchased,
stunned pieces of previous places
floated ticker-tape down
and the sound of instruments
splashed over us and purred
like a lion with antelope
gurgling in its guts, or leopard
with a belly full of monkey,
a blood glut chant exhaled
into her with her cigarette,
vision vapor, a kiss
in all her dark corners.
“The plan is the body,”
quoth she, and I knew that
Creeley had already come
and gone―
need was now,
the body had a plan and
the heart was in the body
and the sound of it
tinged deeply, saturate
to love’s dew point.
28 March 2004
I am you as you are anything
and obey the rationale of cheap sodas in the morgues of Pittsburgh,
warm as roses kept in sardine tins, my mother’s backyard Polish
over lines of laundry and steel soot, everything heavier than it looked,
crack of cloud, seam of caramel splitting the blue collar dream into
unequal parts, we will wear our poet children as epaulets of honor and
genetic disturbance; from a great height the urine falls and has been falling
since several hours before we crawled from the muck, the golden rain,
the trickle-down nectar, power lines dissecting the gray, scoring portions of sky
for the atmosphere barons of the future, the smell of your father’s underwear
in the cellar you unhitch your parachute and swim half as far as expected not even
a fucking merit badge not even one peck on the ass no you’re just handed a helmet
and told to be STORK TWO or TOO or II what the fuck does breakdown mean any
way? Whitemen coming down the gangplank with the entrails of the crew draped
over their necks, fabulous cleavers for hands, spot-on memory dwarves peeking out of
their ever-so-pink ears and dog-hair clouds scudding over the contracting docks with
shooting gallery monotony— after he falls new legs exit from his armpits and he
applies himself to the grater, wee flakes of him falling like pastoral Pasternak on
crystal meth bent over the horse of Ataturk, the beast snorts, stirs dirt with hoof,
pretends it knows the Pennsylvanian trot and shits without thought.
It’s all airborne briefly. Unison leaps help the planet spin. Weight reduction,
picayune thrill, one tomato with the entire works of Stanislav Lubealot carved into
the skin. We’re all related.
20 September 2012