AND STILL I HEAR THAT MONSTROUS ROAR

(I wrote this poem upon being awakened at 6 am by the roar of chainsaws clearcutting nearby some land where I was living in a tree house)

Liquid like a cannonball

explodes into the membrane

between the trees of time

fighting for rhythms of the saw.

I wandered strangely

past these arbored gardens

full of seahorses

and trunks of treasured meals.

You never saw me,

kissed my toes

for chocolate cream and horror.

The roars were not of lions,

they drained the atmosphere of dreams

and ate away the melons of desire.

Still I danced away.

My guns were aimed

at all the tops of pyramids,

the schemes of whiskey dealers

without a wit of monkey heart

or green inside their eye.

The daze drifted away in purple fogs

and the nights I rode for miles

on mares of steel and blood.

When I opened my hand

I found the wine and music

of a distant race of monkeys,

dreamers in the hinterlands

of horror and despair.

These strange flowers screamed

from the passage of a cave

of undulating flesh,

a river filled with snakes

who danced upon a screen

of nails and ice.

The further trumpets coiled and turned,

a veritable landscape of discarded hats

and filtered minds.

From this I drank the acrid films

and shot the enemies

of clovered muskrats

and the humidors of love

without relief.

It was green inside these mountain skulls

and olived with the caracas of monkeys.

I downed their screams;

I danced the night around

in swirling galaxies

of vaginal distension.

This was my highest moment,

my defeat of undesired

obliteration of the dawn.