Gout
GoutJeffrey's feet swell like ballooning corpses
floating down the scarlet Shanghai river
1949; revolutions are abrupt like that;
people die even before they can utter
the malnourished integuments of
their own preposterous names—
Jeffrey's name lives in his toes
and they're big as ectomorphic
Cuban cigars from that cartoon
with the talking rooster who
sounds off like he's got a pair
of drill sergeants hiding in his
comb and blaring like consummating
foghorns while he stutters into
the event horizon of someone
else's staccato foot cramp...
Jeffrey awakens from this
desiccated dreamscape
exfoliating into dust-mite
carrion across the Bitteroot
foothills of his bloated digits
while his mind wanders up
against the prairie fence separating
sublimated pain sensations
from the flickering stadium skylights
of brutal consciousness. Awake,
he finds solace in hundreds of
dirty words scattered across
his wind-swept thought-box
which he proceeds to toss
at the indifference of the heavens
like baeballs from a
hyper-accelerated batting-range
pitching machine.
History is really just
a series of nerve signals
resonating spasmodically
across the temporal echoes
of unexpurgated joltings.
Everything works efficiently
but with too much friction
like loud subway cars,
wheels screeching across metal rails,
or the steady blades of a poultry
slaughterhouse decapitation device
on a conveyor belt—if such things
exist in reality, as they surely
do in the discrete enclaves of
Jeffrey's head measuring
like seismographic barometers
the shockwaves emanating
from his big toe
which resonate like
electric strings plucked
on an amplified
home-made harp
as crystalline forms
spaghettify ligatures
iniside the tiny
crevasses between
squeaky arthritic
joints.
Gout
has four letters,
not enough to count toes
but equivalent
to life.
JZRothstein 4/26/2014
Poetry by Jeffrey Z Rothstein
Read 1411 times
Written on 2014-06-05 at 23:10
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