Iron

perhaps anger following euphoria,
denial of everything bronze like
closing down some of the schools, the bars
of a heavy heart couldn't deter from
drinking oneself into the frying pan
  with dark strong beer,
reading about the Hittites there
  in a pig mood or worse,
no escaping the didactics of steel
offering an advantage of
lifetime-warrantied responsibility
while the soft amassed ore amused itself
by kidding human blood with
  safety pins & belt hooks
before making it into a kind of animal that bled,
recovering livers then deciding to reduce
   the diamond of the mind
 into a foreign occupation,
 a part of Africa worn on the little finger
 of white-nailed models chain-mailed in
  child vanities, who departed by rail
 from a country of sprouting cereals, waking
from agronomy that had arrived with new ploughshares
  to rip apart the welded parsley
 
blood weakening, strengthening, tidal,
as ideas scrapped behind the moon
refresh in successful temperings,
  uncorrodable alloys,
  popular brands punched on haunches of circulating oceans,
 & astral I journeyings
  gleaned at night by carbon analogs on earth

 where slag forms from us & them:
 moral sureties of its redness
 are blacksmithed in the blood,
 wave functions in another vein of the cosmos
  promise lab primates a spinach jungle
   free from organ meat contemplation,
 or will will will,
 ironing itself out in a sacred cow career
    in the karma mines
 
oxygen carrier proteins are you there?
take a deep breath as metals shift
  between cells, treasuries,
  (legs, bioregions
  unbalance),  was there enough
to cast components of a bridle
or would it rust out too soon
  while the brain was turning into Mars?  chromosome 6
    might know, creaking
  in secret censorship of algae
  coming to seek the magnetite of tongues
 
whether enough or not, Hallstatts
  would salt the thought,
 gone out to eat heedless of chlorella,
 a not-yet-stainless taste
 in cutlery fine slicing an enjoyment of the cuisine,
 in adding honed conversation
  to leafy greens their progenitors
 
if these lines are cold striations, colorless gray
  coked up with carbon & limestone,
the impurities might oxidize
   in a blast
   (could the poet get close enough
      to feel it?)
 
predominant in earth's core in belief
     'the nickel of belief'
endowing the initiated place with breakdown
    of enzymes,
& all the entertaining uses
    of meteorites, sized
    as a brooch
     or wagonwheel
  left in Silicon's tomb


Dave Shortt