Ventriloquist

Cupped palms cradle the precious thing

Unable to keep it from slipping away

A fifth of the world's people

Live on one dollar per day

 

Between flux and fixity

The basic structure of suffering

Digestion at any cost

Our greatest asset attention

The emotional equivalent of carbon

 

Our neighbors the microbes and molds

Tunnel with gastronomic logic

Linking virtue to vulnerability

Such gravity as may be generated

Against the horizon of expectation

 

This vale of tears we call our own

Is less like proof than innuendo

If we possess the wit

To work with happenstance

 

The brain like a fragrant seizure

Composed of vapour and light

Awash in an irony that lifts events

Into a kind of anthropology

 

Among the vast machineries of destiny

The strong-willed child

Learns for herself

The shocking joy of the attainable

 

Something delirious

Turning mere silk into curtains

Transactions laden with import

Wheels within wheels within wheels

 

Ventriloquist: One who

speaks from the stomach

Hinting of distance and danger

And whiskers blown back by the wind

 

A tendency to wander

in the name of some beloved ugliness

set round by promises and contradictions

 

Each category has its rubbish heap

Dismantled before one's eyes

 

The constant need for snapshots

Shifts from sharp pathology

To a bemused hallucination

With cannibals

 

Detachment not as abstraction

But process of un-hooking

On the mendicant's trail

A necessary endlessness

 

Unmeasured, like wind

In the empty quarter

Each day directly met in

Filaments of latitude and longitude

 

The face in perpetual grimace

Ravished by clarity

Suppose that the cantor  sings

The way that blood circulates

 

Makes the euphoric discovery

That all pilgrims snore

In the same language.