by Felix Barbone
Alabaster hamburger
upside down fish fry
multilensed predator fly,
wax fruit in a hobnailed
milk glass bowl
give it a try.
Gravy strainers, police whistles,
baseballs, inkwells, sad irons,
candlestick holders, your loose
change is good here.
We’ll make a buck
and have some bloody good luck.
Radioactive boars ripping swan’s
flesh that is being recycled by
sushi merchants selling the
courage as safe to eat blowfish fillets.
Psychedelic Tibetan werewolves
roam the wormwood swamps
searching for more fly agaric
mushroom clouds growing out
of discarded viking helmets
whose rusting iron rims are
pierced by ancient monster oaks.
They long for one more taste
of exploded graphite rods.
Hoping to slaughter dozens of soldiers
the militants are killed by a herd
of stampeding boars while at the
same time a distraught father
kills his 11 month old daughter on
live tv before committing suicide.
Meanwhile a hundred and fifty
years earlier a French acrobat
crosses the Upper Falls of a great
river on a massive rope strung
between its banks and stands on
his head then kneeling dances a jig
while back in France during
the roaring twenties a French
sailor gets smashed at a burlesque
shows the empty glasses of absinthe
lined up in front of him his head
resting on his table with his eyes
staring blankly as a pretty can-can
dancer leans against the table and
lifts up her dress and gives him
the show he really came for
and in a daze his jaw drops
and all that he can say is
What!
Felix Barbone is a poet, musician and trained ethnologist. He is a graduate of SUNY Geneseo and lives on the edge, of Center City.
RUNDELANIA 