I want to be a florist and keep a gun under the counter for my customers.

I’m grown up and want to be a florist no one fucks with but the dead.

Can you say they wouldn’t deserve it?  Fucking with florists?  Jesus.

You don’t think about these things, you read poems.  People do

Though, and they’re just the ones who darken the usually bright doors

Of florists, which could be a metaphor for other kinds of innocence

If that’s the sort of thing you get out of bed for.  Others want sex,

Money, to be feared, and coming by all of it easy, hence the flower thing.

I don’t know that florists are innocent.  I can’t speak to that.  I just want

The chance to pump a few .44s into my persecuters as a florist.

I asked you once not to touch the leaves of the African violets.

I won’t ask again.  Or else what, flowerman?  What are you…

The blood climbs out of them in a column and flattens against the sky

Like a fiery mushroom cloud.  That’s how it looks to them

When they’re doubled over and then they fly right up it into heaven.

It reminds me of the way water rises through a stem and makes me think

Maybe they don’t deserve all that.  But then I remember

I garner amputated parts and keep them alive long enough to sell.

That’s what I am.   And I grow.  Now you know.  Run like hell.     

Family Recordings, Thanksgiving ‘63

Listen to this here.
Down South, there is no 'O' in violence,
nor in those flowers, mostly wild
and all but gone this time of year,
only the sinewy vine of an 'I,'
clinging, curling round, the cold grin,
the little giggle.
The big laugh, the 'O' in god
down South.

The Inhuman Phalloi of the Past's Future

Some specific musculature of retraction
somewhere afferent to the wrist
for a cock to spring clawlike from (the hand/its fundus)
for the purposes of precision in fucking
is a precursor. Also a light for seeing
what you’re doing is a precursor.
Pinpoint fuck accuracy in bioluminescence:
it’s hard to imagine the world
where this is not adaptive. Run like hell.

Doggerel: #2

Riding dirty. On the number 2 bus,
when a skirt bends over straight flashin some 'nus.
I said Dang, girl, I'm likin how you ride southbound.
I got some dangle to straighten out and put in yo mouth.
I'll kill your family, bitch, if you can't make me bust.
Cut your granny open, jumprope with her guts.
Once I penetrate it, batter you up inside,
you'll be defenestrated, rolling down Lakeshore Drive.
Riding dirty

Doggerel: Egypt

You need a shower girl, of the golden kind.
I'm all powerful like pharaohs of olden times.
Half man, half god, I don't spare the rod,
putting body parts in you like canopic jars.