.
       A black sun lights the creases in capital’s night
          nightcrawlers prong.
                The congratulatory vanguardists can accept
             lyrical cinema, somehow, and get away with it.
     Many of the butterflies puppet impressionism too.

The fingers shatter on the keyboard like icicles.

It is Canada, last year. Here, dolphins have given up
all hope of penetrating the distant bay.
Tuna fishing an obscure south-western aesthetic policy.
So, she goes on hegira to the obscurest west.
Ambulances lubricate words before they mince them.
Then we die, best of all. Better that than bedridden
or the lawn’s pandering sprinkler,
the particulates get in everywhere anyhow anyway,
even a little further north of the campus.

He really can see Russia from the horn,
the lahar a spoil of war as the isthmus breaks off.
Flotillas of people remind the accountants
of the G20. We must do something urgently
with our pockets, chimes the ID bracelet.
Not kidding, my lint paradise is a correctional facility.

               The books on screams are being censored,
inevitably, as we rack up debts in every other
humanitarian redoubt on the ferocious globe.
I am an ambulance, after all.

                                                   Lights are peaking.
When we leave Grey Gardens for the swamp,
the two malingerers greet a distant beacon.

 

 

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Corey Wakeling

Corey Wakeling is a poet and critic living in Takarazuka, Japan. His second full-length collection of poems is The Alarming Conservatory (Giramondo, 2018).

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