Bouleversement

A golf club
     shoved
        upside down
       down the length
  of the esophagus —
        the club head just showing
            though teeth

Apartment-dwellers
   in contractor’s bags
      piled at curb for 12:30am
            pickup

Other bags, filled just with blood,
                     opaque, shiny
   bulging, misshapen,
  drained for sodium
and pumped into
   the streetlights

All the city’s dogs
  electrocuted and left stiff,
           piled, burned
                 hair.

Elevators run on long cords
         in whatever direction they are needed.

 

Whimsical Packet

Medical element, preserved
tentacles,
strung walls, busted
umbrellas, rice,
lobster claws
strained violin tops,
scrolls, shower
stars, lone peach with
blossom, S.A.
eggplant colored bath
sticky star, hanging
ice-cube like, isolated
flecks, evidence of scrapes,
more fruits and bursts
faded and distressed.

 

Cerberus

When death was a master and not a miasma, not a failure
of health care—when the graveyard sat within the town, city, square block—
when, sickened, you turned your eyes up—
Fuck the ward and its beeps
            night as it creeps

 

Circumspection

Circumspection
             pushes outward
                           to assimilate

  Fatted,
     and then pushed
into higher state
      hood
         hoos
    hodding handling

Es gibt
Il faut
 To a fault
        he crept

taken token
    too closely
      wrapped

     in 3

  1, 2

 

 

 

[Michael Scharf is the author of Telemachiad and For Kid Rock / Total Freedom. He lives in New York and Shillong.]

 

Copyright © 2012 by Michael Scharf, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.