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