Anvil and Bellows

In all manners Mister Tourniquet intoned attention turning to my treatment

Many times ignored

Many times identical to the carbonate castle

Many times in tribal paint

Unbridled scuttlebutt stargaze releasing children

Palsied in germinal burst


Surface made of metal Missus Skeleton Key: it's a cruel copy

Tantamount to the emotion precinct

Tantamount to the other story imprint

To the opposite self complete with pigment, actually

Archaic catalog of chattel and usufruct

Whose characters include—Professor Blind-Eye-Turning

Sister Bulletproof Jacket

Reverend Dead Man's Gully

Mister Secretary General of the Global Farm Security


Birth lines intersect here with the turnstile attorneys

Whose testimony pictograms a timetable

Into gossip and gainsay the evidence of animals

So menaced by what surrounds

These laws with mindful hand and fodder

As to inaugurate the weightless stranger

Brothering this imbursement

With alleged methods that stain and stoke

That ever more extricate our ancestor

From wonders one and all The End

Then the final credits run with life forms

And we stray either from intimacy

Or the accident part

Emerges between miniature

Movement and application

Austerity and surface

Superposition and plane

Oh river palms and clock face

Stairwell and flagstone

Aspect of a method

Verily over Landscape

With Gazebo adding

Bethlehem rose

Or clump green

                         Wax-warm layers of synthetic skin,

Meat-muddled anniversary

Involuntary bromide book bound to inlay the marriage of word paste

And tooth pull

                         Domina, this minion font and frontage

Over putty in pages

Reproduced by

Lower quadrant anvil

Vertical bellows and antelope

In upward red

                         Quick quick! the syllables to stagger

The enumerated forethought

As when cobalt woodwinds issue silver pearls

"Anvil and Bellows" was previously published in LRL5 (2010). All rights reserved. Reprinted with the permission of the author.