Joe Rosenblatt Poems

THE VOLUPTUOUS GARDEN

 

Contents
    
Gallery Room 1 | Gallery Room 2 | Gallery Room 3
Nebula Home
 

POEMS

 

The Thunder In Those Claws

Was that glucose junkie fast asleep
happily anesthetized in some corolla?
The mind goes numb with disbelief
when a wily cat nabs a hummingbird;
yet, readying a paw above the water,
Felix is also drawn to exotic carp
flitting across a garden's ornamental pond
only to vanish like fervid submersibles
under the surface of that fertile soup.

Staring into the feline's imperious eyes
I sense an emperor's steely power
as slowly he freezes into a sculpture
with his terrible paw still poised . . .
to release the thunder in those claws.

 

The Chef

Enticed by meaty aromas
passersby wander deep inside
the labyrinth of an eatery
spangled with sweet-scented glands
only to fly through a trap door
into a pool of digestive water
while other famished guests
dreaming of supernatural cuisine
climb down a stairwell of pointy hairs
to discover that their chef
is a reclusive stomach
who bathes his diners
in a tub of singing enzymes

 

Contrary Cats

Fat cats aren't fat
they're just widely tumescent
filled with an ethereal love

like an expansive jellybean
with warm fur, and feelings
wrapped around it.

Now, at twenty pounds, Teddy is orbicular

but freed from our earth's oppressive gravity
he'd be more loveable

in hyperspace
weight is a contrary cat

 

Dancing

I have this recurring dream
where I'm dancing with my cats.
This time Priscila has chosen me
as her reluctant dancing partner
and yet what seems more absurd:
our feet don't touch the ground.

I tell her I don't want this dance
though she's not the one who's leading
for in my twisted sleep I know
it's someone else who's doing all the dancing:
you see, that hoofer is the dream
who's dancing with our image
while we go on dreaming
beneath a towering bird feeder.

 

Dr. Anaconda's Kitchen

I'll recommend those prawns of delusion
at doctor Anaconda's fabulous eatery

Crisp, scrunchy, and swimming in their juices
you'll find each critter divinely succulent.

Yet, peruse that menu, and you'll discover
other pieces de resistance of shapely mirages :

sea-bass grilled over an amorous heat
arouses the gastronome seeking foreplay.

You who dine in Paradise, are you prepared
to max your credit card on tidbits of dementia?

And you must try his existential calamarie
steamed in the ink of its own presentiment.

Vapors of desire inspire a famished epicure
awaiting the glazed parfait of immortality.

 

Orbicular Cats

Teddy wants to make a statement:

I am orbicular,
and proud of it . . .
Orbicular is what I am
and what are you?

wide, yet not quite oval
like an egg tumescent in tremulations

Teddy occasionally goes astray
and then he's not orbicular

but more roundedly prosaic
in a domestic sense

Teddy loves the sound of the word orbicular
but how does it translate on the wild side

into Felinese?

 

A Blushing Ague

The day was dressed in mauve
as Dr. Anaconda's daughter strolled
among some smitten hollyhocks.

They shook their dusty heads
and in a sibilant voice declared:
"Anna, how voluptuous you look today"

But she'd not abide their leering
for being dim in temperament
she was suspicious of all that leafy lechery
so palpable, it seemed to climb . . .
desiring her creamy alabescent skin.

And so Anna fled from that famished crowd
with some pollen on her blouse.

A blushing ague chilled her soul
but freed her mind to wander in the nude
back to a downy queen-sized bed
accompanied by a pair of obese cats
who drooled out her name in Felinise
but in a dialect, untranslatable-

She lay beside those mesmerizing Abyssinians
finding much comfort in their gaze
that weighed upon her painted eyelids
until she, and they, disappeared
into an azure reverie.

 

Tiddles

Ah, but she was fluent in Felinese
and in other leonine pastiches;
some of which was conveyed
from mewling friends in heaven

"We love you, Anna," they meowed
as night after night, she lay in bed
with Tiddles, a street-smart stray ginger cat

who, licking her inner ear, enlightened her
on purring cadences and wily Eros,
in linguistic subtleties of marginal felinity,
the ones-who don't win blue ribbons . . .

and that of other brawling chip-eared scrappers
dwelling in the inner city, who dine alone
and sometimes die like sickly jungle cats
abandoned by their tawny peers

who'll not share an essential flank
from some freshly-killed wildebeest
buzzed by mournful blowflies
in a white incinerating light.

 

Freda

Freda went to her demise in the stomach acids of a big reptile at one of Dr Anaconda's extravagant bashes.

I'm repelled by the image of a huge schlange sucking in an amphibian, slowly, very very slowly. So slow, you might catch a catnap before the poor victim finally disappears, and there's nothing there but a smile.

I've seen snakes smile in a serpentarium. Usually after eating a rat. That happens before the crowds get there to get off on an extended phallo-imperialist.

Dr. Anaconda gets off on bores. Sometimes he'll even welcome crashing bores to his parties. I fancy it's his perverse way of amusing himself, his method of exorcising the boredom out a bore-no different really than depossessing a kid with an overactive Mensa-powered imagination.

Lately, however, the doctor has had a troubling vision that all the bores were heading for extinction, disappearing like over-fished salmon, and soon they will have to be bred, like cloned fish. It saddens the doctor to think of all those poor bores cramped into pens.

There will come a day when you will ask some sun-tanned stranger: "are you a real wild sea-going bore, or one of those artificially raised pellet-eating types?

Have seen your Freda at the local bog, lately?

 

And Then The Purring Earth Begins To Move

Gardens are sometimes cats that sleep
late into a summer's afternoon
and when evening finally arrives
each tabby released from its delicious nap
unwinds like a snake on some downy bed.
Rising like famished spectres they inhale
swarms of dancing dragonflies.

Pulsing through a night that wears
only itself for funereal clothes
my frightened soul, a woodland moth
flutters across some familiar agate eyes.

And then the purring earth begins to move
extending a gentle paw for me to rest
while my eyelids close upon each wing.

 

And Why Do You Gaze At Me Like That?

Where did you hide the body, Felix
under what log in the woods?
Always, inhaling the minutest of fragrances,
you've changed . . . you keep straying away
from home, no longer content to recline
on our bed, sofa, or dining room table.

I saw you bolt through the open gate
you had a mouse locked in your mouth.
You've changed-you're wild, fellow!
Forget the rodent club-return to the house . . .

Now where did you hide that teensy cadaver?
Why do you need to supplement
your diet with woodland strangers?

And why do you gaze at me like that?

 

My Heaven

Towering over them
I am their Provider
sprinkling larval ambrosia
over the surface of their pond .

At late afternoon
semi-colons of vermilion love
hurry over to my shadow
to kiss particles of heaven.

I stare down at scintillating koi
can they view their total benefactor?
Perhaps they see me only as a hand
or some limb of a tree?

It's nourishing to be loved
to be there when I'm needed.

And is it so bad to venerate my hand?
How often do worshippers flock to contemplate
the withered hand in a church reliquary ?
Am I not a saint to these goldfish
who depend on me ?

I'm their father
and they are my family.

 

The Thunder In Those Claws

Was that glucose junkie fast asleep
happily anesthetized in some corolla?
The mind goes numb with disbelief
when a wily cat nabs a hummingbird;
yet, readying a paw above the water,
Felix is also drawn to exotic carp
flitting across a garden's ornamental pond
only to vanish like fervid submersibles
under the surface of that fertile soup.

Staring into the feline's imperious eyes
I sense an emperor's steely power
as slowly he freezes into a sculpture
with his terrible paw still poised . . .
to release the thunder in those claws.

 

Dr. Anaconda's Psyche Office

He keeps his psyche office open
for indigents of the mind and heart-
whose souls are in need of renovation,
thus nurturing the Muse who dwells
behind the plaster of a decaying house
where it absorbs nibblets of illusion.
Yet, at times, "ol'Doc" will make a house call
offering solace to some penurious rhymester
uninspired, and starving, in a freezing garret
inhabited by fading mice, and crazy silverfish-
and soon a spectre will arrive for the rent
with a bloodless hand extended to that tenant
while silently ignoring Dr. Anaconda's plea
to spare an aged mouser sleeping in the closet
Dr. Anaconda's Psyche Office

He keeps his psyche office open
for indigents of the mind and heart-
whose souls are in need of renovation,
thus nurturing the Muse who dwells
behind the plaster of a decaying house
where it absorbs nibblets of illusion.
Yet, at times, "ol'Doc" will make a house call
offering solace to some penurious rhymester
uninspired, and starving, in a freezing garret
inhabited by fading mice, and crazy silverfish-
and soon a spectre will arrive for the rent
with a bloodless hand extended to that tenant
while silently ignoring Dr. Anaconda's plea
to spare an aged mouser sleeping in the closet

 

Nocturnal Lunatic

Evening brings out the macabre
in the darker side of a light gray cat
inspired by a shrilly rodential song
he brings his trophy home for me to view.
I watch him quickly disappear from sight
dragging his gristly prize away into the night
like a lioness conveying viand for her cubs.
My Little Messenger

My little messenger has a happy face
as he moves on his snowy slippers.
Smitten by a cold nocturnal light
I see my cat turn to stare up at a stranger
who he knows isn't just another frightened mouse.

Felix desires to devour that noiseless moon
and he won't have him taken by any poacher
straying into his zone of feline influence
or by any other clever creeping devil
who, guided by their opalescent eyes,
glide through a summer's evening.

In terror, we freeze like voles beneath a hedge
while they invade our cathedrals of fog.

 

Their Holy Banquet

They have anticipated my arrival
An inspired messiah is here
to sprinkle a larval ambrosia
over the surface of a little pond.

Offering their miniscule blessings
a vermilion elite of Passionists
shielded by my towering shadow
swim over to their holy banquet.

Oh, how I love to feed these luminaries
Yet can I take the stress of that Sacred labour
and am I worthy of your prayers, little ones?

 

Alfredo, I think my well is filling up with cats

(for my translator, Alfredo Rizzardi)

What do they really think of us when they recline
on beds, tables, sofas, or perch on windowsills?
Or are they poseurs who believe they're really cats?
I think we dream when we think they're dreaming.

Alfredo, it seems my well is filling up with cats
everywhere there are cats! cats! cats! cats!
Damn it, I need a drink-the human race is a disgrace!

Pass the grappa, Lady Muse, come fill my cup up with cat
Oh, I'm so damned tired of that common crowd
who've no true whiskers-or crafty reptile mind.

But yes, I make exceptions, now and then-
for dreamy women who become honourary cats.

 

Dr. Anaconda's Pain Practice

He doesn't alleviate pain. He conveys it, not with a dental drill, or stretching rack, but with pure mind over mere protoplasmic matter. Now, you may ask: why would anyone who is wired correctly, request some pain? Repressing a contemptible grin for the layman, and using a smile taken out of his hard drive, " doc " will inform you that it's not pain as we understand it, but really an elasticized pleasure, so intense, it can be mistaken for pain; neither, to use the coarse vernacular, is his subject undergoing a " mind fuck." No, the sacred alpha rhythms in Dr. Anaconda's weighty brain are not employed by any egoistic evil doer, but by a " Prince of Brightness," none other-than the munificent doctor himself. A psychic therapist, he often reins in the umbilicus of his ego in considering what form of therapy his patient needs, ortaking the matter a step further-anyone worthy to be on his party mailing list-essentially enters into the spirit of his motto:
IF YOU DON'T SWING-DON'T RING!

Can the individual take a full brimming tide of extremist pleasure?

 

Padding through the Pampas Grass

Padding through the pampas grass
I see this silent panther greet
some frozen sparrow with a kiss
while another cat strides across the lawn
and Teddy joins his brother, Felix
in contemplation of the perfect still life.

Mother Sunlight dabs their tranquil faces
as though in deep atonement and despair
for the world's carnivorous sin
and all her twisted appetites.

Illumed, the duo let a lacquered beetle pass
before they hum an inward psalm
for their tiny friend, at rest-
under that feeder in the garden.

 

The Prince of Pleasure

Dr. Anaconda, the prince of pleasure
lived in a slum dwelling of the heart
with his daughter Anna, & her twisted cats
If you don't swing, don't ring
that brazen message was loud and clear
and darkly lettered on a sign across the door
which was bolted shut to keep out crashing bores;
yet whores were welcome if accompanied by adults.

"Hello, fellow," said Dr. Anaconda to a decorous snake
who'd arrived, and with his split tongue, rang that bell.
He owned a set of hazel eyes, and a snaky tight subtle smile
this wasn't your average pushy tourist, or voyeur, but a do-er.
so Dr. Anaconda knew he 'd fit right in with his group.

"Hello, I'm Fred," said that reptile, " do you mind if I sail in?"
From tip to shining tip, there was some twenty feet
of apodal tapestry to that undulating devil
and although that suit had no arms
Anna fancied him as a tactile sort of lover
adept at applying seductive pressure.

 

The Voluptuous Gardener

Hilda, the voluptuous gardener is tuned into a voice in the hollyhocks. It's a delicious sound somewhere between a treculated meow and a cicada's tremulation.Yet there's more than an audiophile in the woman. The chlorophyll nurse in her also demands she lend a vigilant ear out for the plaintive cry of a sick garden plant. She, for instance, might detect the hysterical whimper of a tomato who has just discovered some vicious blight on its face. If the plant was fortunate, its desperate cry would be picked up by Hilda.

Is this whole thing a dream? The odd thing about it is that everybody is in the sacred buff, and that includes Hilda, who doesn't mind flashing her delicious exterior at the elements of the natural world. She has to reciprocate because she knows it would be selfish of her simply ogle the nude plant life and not offer something in return. The selfless exhibitionist demands she give satisfaction to a famished viewer. Indeed, she not only welcomes giving satisfaction, fulfilling her obligation, but enjoys the very act of stripping down to her birthday skin, and spreading her shapely arms toward what she perceives as a pregnant squash resting on the horizon.For Hilda, the sky is another garden, always proliferating in abundant star veggies. "

Ra, baby, glow on me ...glow me good... " Sometimes that experience is so intense it brings on a premature, although modest orgasm. And there are days when solar lustiness completely takes over her life, and her thoughts are filled with seedlings of cosmic prurience. She wants to grab that burning ogler of a fireball and devour it.

Call it oral sex if you're a vulgarian of an Earthling fettered to the mundane. Hilda isn't some pansy nature poet getting off on buds and bugs. Her poetic vision is far more expansive, and hyper-spiritual. She yearns for communal sex without bad

odours and sweat glands.

 

Hilda on Rehab

How does one treat an addiction to pleasure? Take Hilda for instance who enjoys her dream sex with fauna fraught with felinity, and creatures no so wholly formed on the terrestrial plane. Clearly Hilda is a victim of her over-active glands. To look at her you would think she didn't have any glands, or for that matter-bones.

She appears, well-boneless? Maybe she does have some cartilage and bends with the erogenous flow, not unlike a sand shark prepared to fly out at a school of fish foolishly loitering in the shallows. With Hilda, however, it's different.

First, unlike a shark there's not a whiff of ammonia about her, nor is she into wild musk. It takes a lot of foreplay to get her going. Smoking some sweet pond grass releases her inhibitions, leaving her vulnerable to dermal manipulations.

That's foreplay enough for her. Getting that sugary warm feeling down into her lungs . . . In her dreams she is always amenable to the flow of libido, restful strokes and massages from her environmental companions. It's all satisfying sex-a paw there-a tendril here . . .

Her vegetal lovers enjoy exploring her intimately So do those pampered cats. But what inspires Hilda in an extra-sensual way is smoke. And she's not ashamed to admit that sex goes better with smoke . It's safer than having sex with multiple partners outside her garden. The bladderworts call out to Hilda by the pond.

"Oh, Hilda-squeeze us."

 

Curlicues of Smoke

They blow curlicues of smoke profaning the most sacred spaces. Yet I find myself empathizing with some smokers. So overwhelming is their addiction that I sense that not enough ventricles exist on their person, to accept, or expel those fumigations ghosting up to the ceiling to join, and make love to other smoky tributaries . . .

Smokers in your average pub could use additional nostrils, or perhaps an extra mouth below the jaw line made of plastic in the shape of a blowhole, an orifice small enough to be concealed by a scarf, as to not frighten some smoke-phobe patron sitting a few tables over.

In this age of smokers' apartheid a cigarette has become an obscenity akin to flashing red meat in a vegetarian restaurant. More than ever, the smoker requires a societal niche for the purpose of expressing in psalmodic smoke, his or her spirituality. I believe it's a matter of freedom of religion. If I'm to interpret the arcane, that sacred smoke says, "today you and I are a cloud of Oneness . . be ye reborn on an updraft . . . Brothers and Sisters . . . rise with me to the pinnacles of the Mountain, and bear witness to His countenance"

My smarting eyes run with tears. Yet I respect that worshipper, even as smoke climbs upon my lap, reclining there like an unwanted cat. Some individual is inviting me to join the flock in an ecumenical prayer. Waving that smoke away I return it to a pietist engaged in a serial prayer.

 

Wildebeests of the Sea

A herd of quillbacks with monstrously huge heads a third the size of their meaty bodies move across the plains of a seabed. On the surface of the ocean a tiger of a fisher is stalking them: they are my wildebeests, and I'm on their scent trail. I send my musk-scented fishing line, with its chrome lure formed like an anchovy down to the dance floor of the sea. Appropriately named The Grim Reaper, this lure with its viciously honed barbed treble hook, brails the muck, stirring up the sediment. Muck! That's where my quarry are cruising. I know those spiny rockfish love the fertile ooze. They are vacuuming along the bottom, sucking in crustaceans and other delectable crawly things that bottom-feeders adore. The monsters lip read their food sources. My aluminum boat drifts with the many cross-currents and I must make certain I don't move too far away from where I sense the herd in trekking. Too close into shore and I lose them, for the creatures don't fancy a sandy floor.!

The deep brimming tide is still with me and the line is still going down at a ninety degree angle which means that the tide is at rest, not moving too quickly and pulling my Grim Reaper and line away from those curious mouths. Suddenly I sense their presence. It's almost uncanny, but I feel a palpable pressure on my line. Are they playing with my lure? Are they serious? They 're nudging it along, as though it were a toy. I feel the bumps, but no hard stuff, no tugging . I must put more action into the lure. They must assume that it is a jiving juvenile of a fish, hot to dance with strangers in the dark. Isn't anybody hungry down there, I cry, violently jigging my lure, hoping the pea-brained fish with the awesome mouth will let their lips do the talking.

Damn it, I've religiously sharpened those hooks. The feral killer in me demands prosaic results, a fishy mouth gaffed on those hooks. I keep manipulating my idol. I visualize it bopping along and scaly lunkers whirling around it, and breathing upon what they imagine is a suicidal anchovy.

It's almost evening, the heat is gone, and there is still a deep enough tide for the quillbacks to loiter about hoping the tide will pull their food stock along. The tide works like a moving belt that serves as a banquet table. The fish are nibbling along the path of that belt.

I'm not merely fishing. No, I see myself as a predator. I like the sound of that word. Predator. I hope those bruisers inhale the delicious aroma that I know fish like. Go for it my serrated-spined gnu, juicy beasts-I imagine you filleted and steaming in soya sauce. Bring your friends, too, you hear. Cannibal gourmands on an outing fifty fathoms down, maybe more.

Are they following a school of feed, shiners, flashy herrings, or needlefish? Are they inhaling the scented lure the way a gourmet inhales haute cuisine? How can they see my lure down there in the inkiness?

Who lights their way to the feeding grounds? I envision those quillbacks moving like somnambulists. They're dreaming their way along the bottom, sniffing and lipping or sucking in fiery red shrimp. Soon something in their brain will pop like an exploding grape and they will go berserk for my lure.

A tug on my line. It's happing-something is pulling my line-tightening it. I whip my rod, jerking the jig up vertically, driving the hooks deeper into the mouth of that phantom, who suddenly pulls away into a kelp bed. It's time to haul this dream up.

 

Genetic Material

Lines extend from a nucleus of form. In my drawings personalities grow exactly like limbs. Just as in real life a pollywog changes into an adult amphibian, a drawing's protolimbs proliferate, gaining meatier dimensions, and bloom into a shape. Those creatures in my landscape carry my genetic material. Often I will come up with the title days after the drawing is completed. Or the reverse-a title emerges before I even start the drawing. In my mind the landscape with its intricacies is there germinating, waiting to sprout up from the cerebral soil. The drawing paper demands its form. It wants to be fed and craves for limbs. And perhaps a spiritual envelope called the soul.

 

Serial Lover

Airbladders drawn
out of their mouths
spiny rockfish
settle in repose
in a fishing bucket.

Feeling no pity for these cannibals
I've applied my "priest"
across their thick skulls
clubbing them for minnow molestation
and tempestuous infanticide.

Like some fascist surgeon
I'll fillet these brutes
without an anesthetic
and glow in my sacred labour
when those lips form inaudible pleas.

But why do their eyes keep gazing at me?

Do they suspect
I'm the serial lover . . . the guy
who opened their mother
letting her egg sac spill out
across the kitchen counter
and then watched intently

as the cats inhaled her caviar?

 

Inside A Throbbing Shroud

A portly cat in my dream
charged with charcoal gray electricity
falls to earth with his prize:
I chase this crazed magician
beneath the feeder
to liberate a piping Song Sparrow.

What inspires a mellow beast like Felix
to spring through an open window
and become a pensive little tiger
crouching in the grass?

Purring celestial greetings
apparitions of the evening
coil about me until I'm snug
inside a throbbing shroud

 

Let Us Sing

It's filet mignon for the soul
when cats sing in Felinese

although it all depends
upon the weather

for some songs are brighter
on a sunny day

When cats sing in Felinese
they're sonorously delusional

How many times have you seen a cat smile
having inhaled the rodent in a song?

We all should sing in Felinese
gleeing in our discovery
of cantorial mice dancing softly
inside a melody.

Brothers and sisters, let us sing in Felinese

 

The Smokers

Hilda has taken a deep drag on her enriched cigarette and slipped into the jetstream of a dream and although her hazel eyes are open, the rest of her body is asleep. I note the dilated eyes of her feline companions. Hilda and her friends are into substance abuse, joined in an avatar of what appears to be a bedroom by seemingly innocent fauna with its indigenous birds and insects that are eerily puffing on cigarettes which contain an indeterminate intoxicant The group is on some contact high from Hilda's pleasurable curlicues. No question who the smoke boss is. Her behaviour is on par with that of lonely alcoholics who imbibe with their pets . I've seen that wide glassy-eyed gaze before when my cats have inhaled a generous track of parsley-green catnip .

As surely as a gnawed carrot in a summer garden suggests a rabbit presence, there 's a catnip connection behind this fumy orgy.

It would unconscionable to allow Hilda to keep drifting past the earth's horizon. I feel compelled to whisper into those petite ears: " Time to get up, sweetpea . . ."

Is she in some paradisiacal cocoon? Has Hilda abandoned her friends? She doesn't seem to care. It's as though they're into group sex via the smoke, and this sex is more intense than sex by natural means. This is the best kind of sex-spirit sex, clean sex, sex without actually touching . . . safe sex, with none of the viruses, or that sticky sweat-and insulting sounds like-panting and sighing-and yes, shrieks without end-no this is phantom sex through configurations of mystical smoke. The best kind of sex available on this terrestrial plane.

Her creamy white skin aches for more of that haze . . . demanding more orifices to take in that ultra sweet smoke.

Hilda, who's that smoker under your bed?

 

A Talented Primate

My mid-sixties' psychic therapist was a Mandril baboon incarcerated at Vancouver's Stanley Park Zoo. Ahead of his time, he was a true performance poet. But more gratifying to me, he was a damned good therapist, and what a selfless being (although he suffered from neurosis due to his incarceration) ! With his active purply-red, cobalt-blue, and white-hued proboscis, threatening incisors, beady amber eyes, and his fiery buttocks he quickly attracted a worshipful crowd to his claustrophobic consulting room of a cage. Once their therapy began, they were bombarded by projectiles of his excrement, and he would shamelessly relieve himself in their midst. Sad to say, being an old primate, he had prostate problems, couldn't find that full pressure to anoint them deservingly with a righteous golden shower. Sometimes his fans would wait patiently between performances, ogling him curiously, while he attacked heaps of over-ripened fruit and vegetables with infant-like hands. That creative lunch hour was his standard reading fee. I suppose he was expected to fuel up on the stuff between each militant reading session of his primal poems. He might have bested or diminished today's mediocre" performance poets" with his spontaneity and bouts of pyrotechnics, his theatrical presentation and his grunting epiglottal poetics-dark-sided snapping strophes. I say, might have, because I'm not sure if that poor beast is dead now-done in not just by old age, but by lousy food and poor working conditions, plus the stress of an abysmally ignorant fan club who wouldn't have known a poem from a clump of baboon offal. Ah, what a delight he was. Poet, therapist and mentor.

The decades have done nothing to fog the image of that beast spasmodic with rage, hissing and grunting out his primordial lines. I wish I could have thanked him in some way for teaching me how to speak through a mask, ( in my case-psychic mask) before he was unconscionably sold to the San Diego zoo, and for what? A few peanuts I suspect. Unlike the general public grousing about state patronage to artists, none of his fans ever complained where their tax-dollars were going. This delightful creature who I would never call a monster, shares my museful world. I see him munching on apples that have fallen from the tree in my garden. He joins my cats, and a menagerie of Song Sparrows, and less exotic feathered creation. He lumbers over to the pond and examines the goldfish who are slumbering under a lily pad. He enjoys the swarming dragonflies. But most of all he knows he doesn't have to perform his poems any more. The fresh scrunchy veggies in the garden are delicious . . . oozing with delectable chlorophyll and nourishments that you and I could never fathom in the taste spectrum of a talented primate.

 

In The Tangled Garden of My Brain

In the tangled garden of my brain
clings a spider lady and her web of tears;
she's watching me in ultra violet
with her many hungry eyes
while I'm dangling in the air
sharing an azure sky
with other pilots of despair
humming their indecent songs

Although it's not a sunny day
we hang our sadness out to dry.

 

Combustion

Beast, how dare you beg.
You, from the great tribe of Tiger
go into that steamy jungle of a garden
slay your wildebeest, and bringing forth
your quarry-a field mouse,
lay your prize on my doorstep
still warm, as though your breath
anesthetized that amusing trophy
as though that terrible fire in your eyes
burning with a precious opalescent terror
hypnotized that singing rodent, to perfection
with just a mere combustion of your growl.

Friend, would you spare a slavish master
asleep in a tangled forest of your appetite?

 

Tina

Doctor Anaconda is throwing another one of his Nature-groping parties, and so I'm bringing Sally a huge Fire-Bellied Toad . I know she'll make a splash with the other guests. I try to imagine how " Doc " will react. I see him stepping back instinctively as I introduce my date of the evening. He appears visibly shaken, afraid to touch her, as though just standing next to her warty skin will give his soul a good case of impetigo.

"See you brought a Firebelly-" he says, with a nervous chuckle. A thin artificial smile forms on his pale lips. Yet it has a smidgen of sincerity, a little glitter which tells me he really likes her, as he struggles for a compliment.

"Yeah, she's a beaut alright," he says," his face flushed red, not unlike a choir boy who has been caught hairy-handed in an onanistic ritual. "Keep an eye on her, fellow, cause we're having Tina over to do a dance for us in the arborium."

Tina, it's always Tina-Tina this, or Tina that. I'm no gossip yet something tells me Tina the Bluebottle fly and doc are getting it off around the pond like newborn Mayflies.

 

Dr. Anaconda's Ugly Gallery

At Dr. Anaconda's Ugly Gallery
distorted souls come into view;
It's you and I, transmogrified-
the self can't hide, nor slide away
like some pet boa constrictor.

Stare directly at your portrait
for what you're gaping at
is leering back at you, in love .

Friend, accept that vital monster
for that's all you'll ever have.

 

Zooey and Her Magic Belt

Standing erect like an idol, Zooey exudes the confidence of a feline wired to her goddess because of the magic properties in a belt she 's wearing . Yet in the drawing there's something out of place, for why would any self-respecting cat wear a fetishistic article of clothing unless, of course-she's a cross-species dresser? Somebody, a deviant cat-fancier has forced her to go in drag. I tell you she's pure cat, and not the product of some warped imagination.

Take a good look at that belt. Study it. Either those are mouse-notches on her belt depicting her kills in the wild, or they're the replicating powers of a rodent deity.
 

Gallery Room 1 | Gallery Room 2 | Gallery Room 3
Nebula Home