There’s no exotic compass metaphor we’ve yet contrived

to navigate this stubborn tesseract,

no magnet-nestled gimble left, coherent to these wicked storms

rendering all this taffy-twisting talk of ethics in the Trumpet hearted nebularies

both unsituated and insensible;
 

from the priests, I get a homily;

for the pundits, I grant them circulation,

from those remotely guided, antiseptic joystick bombardiers,

a tailored shibboleth or two :

       a courageous Semper Fortis,

       perhaps a dram of Semper fi

and from the diabolic counterfeit intelligence-machines,

a newly implemented syntax,

writ with utmost caution no semantic sentiment should intervene.

Savoring the Sunday morning funny papers, horoscopes

or cheap rococo-saturated glamour magazines,

there’s newsprint scattered through the empty train cars

       read and torn;

daylight swallowed by a hungry tunnel as

the seething engine blasts its spiral horn.

       oh how we quarreled then, Maclean!

and there’s the speculating functionaries, poring over antique watercolor’d maps,

decrypting matrices to unfamiliar foreign beaches,

sailing through vast, horrifying pools of large unpleasant ocean creatures,

the arcadian refulgence, twice crisscrossed with cunning traps;

the Argument itself mimicking the metaphysics of the dialogue,

much as the Subject, thus aroused, pressed into the vestments of the demagogue.

( a howling narrates throughout the concourse, squeezed

between the bronze glass doors

the wind blowing leather hammers through the rainy streets

against the panes,

gingerly capricious in its predatory machinations

a puddle forms the shape of jesus christ across the granite floor)

Let the navies and the armies swell outside, Maclean,

to do their thing

the sea lick the steaming holes of your bright bronze cannons

taking potshots at the albatross’s gangling wing

as each of us withdraws behind the wretched hedges we have charmed

to epic heights between us;

So watch us whip the children, whip the dogs,

whip the bloody orange trees!

look around you, see!

we haven’t time to teach them how to whip themselves;

let reason steer your dry white bones

before the tendons, strung like sainted banjo strings,

       the stretching sails themselves,

pluck and fill the dreadful valley with their prison songs.

next on, the shivering towers rising from

the sylvan skirts of sumptuous, flag stabbed forest gardens and

their tethered ivory-tinted unicorns;
where horrified, the vestal virgin came upon the scene
       and cried for several months;

is said you stabbed him with a kitchen knife; this is true?

The time to quarrel through alternative solutions

now a relic of the distant past,

       oh how we used to crow, Maclean! . . cans’t, thou recall?

Now inconsequential and elastic toward the management of

these strangest of geometries in frightful new configurations

       cleft in eighty-eight dimension cleaves,

anointed in a chilling rite of venerated, consummately soulless

genuflection, are now

       wove through the pinhole on a chequered weave,

(who let the rain pour through the bronze glass doors,

was it you again forswore your legendary post?

condemned at last to drown a mercenary end,

       ‘was me who laughed when you got yours,

i says to daft Mclean!

was me let go of both the oars!)

A puddle in a host of wee, congealing tear-like drops

       forms the too familiar shape of jesus christ,

before the unassuming bank clerks on their lunch breaks

stopped to cross themselves;

a janitor was called, a whistle blew, all traffic stopped across

the flooded causeway of the newly consecrated granite floor.

A stalwart sponge; incorruptible hirsute stick and pail of tin

to square such complicated things!

       was more ironic a solution to the purpose than was clever,

(though virtuous, was even little less sufficient

towards the cruel impatient, almost calculating weather)

 

thus verily and most contrarily,

(as befits a tesseractive taffy-pull)

the unpretentious glass and bronze philosopher in khaki-grey

is never fairly recognized for any humble sage endeavor,

nor from these harsh and strange, implausible perspectives

       is he ultimately, nor resplendently,

              driven mad by us forever.

Jeff Thomas is a writer and artist from Long Island. Eyes went bad from wearing multiple corrective lenses drawing pubs and clock movements. Cooks and cares for multiply disabled daughter who figures often in his work.