Pour me an epiphany on the rocks sunny side up with a twist

_____Ah! tout est bu, tout est mangé!
__________–Verlaine

Of the totally abstract
______hopelessly inscrutable
____________powder of the cosmiverse
______to fuck up everything I sing I sing.

Into the valley of death they ride,
“Half a sylb, helf a solb, holf a salb onward,”
they chant and I quote with all of my hurt
prominently displayed upon mirrors of infinity
apposed obliquely under duress.

Perhaps a bit of exposition channeled through diversion
even inversion and a series of “You don’t say” type blurts
would be the odor of the placental creatures’ wool.

Cries of “nonsense will avail you nothing” won’t suffice
to berate the lack of meter and asolnonce
for now is a time as adequate as any for the total exclipse
formerly shadowed in doubt. For egsample::

Logic is the last refuge of scoundrels peddling the sins of the fathers.
Nothing proceeds without big lies since the decay of verse into prose fiction.
That one is the only one and no one is only sly nomen or Noman though not a pipe.

And all these yestodays blighted pools the fey to musty breath.
To borrow and to borrow and to borrow craps in shits sweaty place
from say to say til the last shibboleth of imported grime.

Play it again in Café Americain for old times’ sake. If she can stand it, I can.
But Dooley was a drummer and he couldn’t do it. Try Ella.
Why did she have to go? Why does anybody?
“It’s the beast of boredom,” calms the Joyfreud,
“come to fertilize us all.” Ah shit.

____

John Marvin is a teacher who retired and subsequently earned a Ph.D. in English at SUNY Buffalo. He has poems in scores of journals, including 6 Pushcart nominations, and literary criticism in Hypermedia Joyce Studies, James Joyce Quarterly, Pennsylvania English, and Worcester Review. He has a chapter in Hypermedia Joyce, and his book, Nietzsche and Transmodernism: Art and Science Beyond the Modern in Joyce, Stevens, Pynchon, and Kubrick, awaits a publisher. He seeks to marry the experimental, non-narrative with the lyric and traditional in the manner of Nietzsche’s marriage of Apollo and Dionysos. He generally avoids accessibility for its own sake, and the prosaic personal story with superimposed line breaks that is ubiquitous these days.