Morphine Along The Susquehanna
                                       for Barbara Browning

That poet is a cyborg. His machine
runs on blood and swarms inside cowry shells.
That poet is a vulture in drag
between the living and the dead.
He never sleeps on water
and he dreams inside everyone who touches him.
He’s a cyborg. Maybe the iron
in his articulations is similar to the little bones
inside cherries, to the clanking of flowers
as they close their gates at night over aphids
and the latex bodies of interstellar pollen.
He’s on fire. That poet is an indeterminate juju
at the intersection of the dissection
of your hemispheres. The poet, not that one, is
a dishrag wrapped around a sponge. He worships
a quince. He is the subtle side of subversion.
In other words, always the other word
that defies definition, a perverted antonym.
Don’t even try to out house his infectious rhythm.
He carries madness in his penis. Biolysis.
He’s his own father. His head should be castrated,
his hair fed to the silverfish and the monkey
parked outside the door to the temple at Tirupati.
His wig is pregnant. His clitoris a clothespin.
His testicles are ovaries. His nipples prostate glands.
Don’t feed him anything but roosters, dog, and goat.
His photo is a pun on an enemy’s foot.
His rainbow is a serpent. His passion
is a raven. His shield is Achilles’ heel.
If you possess him his liquid will quickly
flow into the ocean. He vacations in Xanadu.
If you dance in his anus the lights will go out.
If you suck his prosthesis he’ll lisp.
My sister walks barefoot into the ballroom
and cuts her heart on a piece of glass.
A man without a mask is chasing me.
My mother turns into a fetus on an island in the Adriatic.
The walls of the city are waves of fertilizer.
I can’t spell cast. I can spell fish and DDT.
I can spell poet anyway I want----p o i t, etc.
A poet is a preconceived solution of nothing.
Don’t eat out of his petri dish.
He’s a customs official at conception. A cyborg.
It’s amazing what living by a river will do to you.
Pick up a syringe and communicate with the moon.
Pick up the moon. It’s the deus ex machina on the screen.