Eating Metal

Eating Metal

Nourishment is old-fashioned
like Veronica Lake
who was a beautiful black and white magpie
and never collected anything but sad
bits of the next nest

please give that girl a handful of staples and spoons
to pummel her into the modern swing.

Bread and booze, the old foods
are foolish, and change- bread becoming beastly
over the course of the body,
and I know I will too; as Veronica taught me.

It wears me down
like a garden of gray and flaking shale; let
it stay the same through, I will even be
glad when the pins hook my coiling hose
I'll let them prick and cling,
fierce magnetics grounding me to my same self-
or, if they unhitch, I am glad for their constant shining.

Burnt rosemary aches of bitter mustard,
Bay leaves leak alcohols. Foods bear
change. But wire barbs
are rust and real.
Their scratches are for my old itch
which began in my throat and shuffled down to my stomach.

Veronica makes me like copper best
because it is the choicest blood without breathing.

Robin Hood poem

I've been watching too much of BBC's Robin Hood. Poor Much.

The Merry Man

His inevitable breakdown sleeps
on the pad of reeds next to him

He is remembering when under the glass sky at Acre
like apothecarian examinations
he squirmed at you like
a broken little beetle
leaving arrow footsteps singing
in circles around sleep mats
to be brushed out in the morning.

He has strong little legs grown when the world was only
a bullheaded lion king
and hard charging, and bandaging,
now when he finally sleeps it is into the color England,
though he’s no idea why.

His taste in men is so singular
the point of a sword
or compass arrow.

But devotion does not mean full
so when he washes himself in the cracked water
when he washes your dishes and your clothes against his own skin
and morning warbles into the boundless color England
he senses the exact proportions of his loneliness.

Little beetle tramping
for him
it is a longer distance between spaces.