Nelson Gary & Manuel Schwab

Queen of Sheba

101. 

Well, the Book of  Leviticus and Deuteronomy
the law of  the jungle
and the sea
are your only teachers
–Bob Dylan, "Jokerman," Infidels
                                                   
Celebrate X-rated ghost’s aura, outermost epidermis, topless in denim: glowing phoenix.
A shift into neon, moonlit on the blind alley of  Steeple Street to which tortured soft tissue
responds with craters,
a testament of faith,
and the smooth relief of pleased cartography
drawn with caresses, melts in soothing colors from fingers the feel
of crayons’ tips aflame with holy ripples of prints adrift as tapers.
A utopia of Puritan fur, candlestick gold, garden leaves, the leprosy of unfortunate
dwarves, laboratory animals, and the linked tails of cats
sanctify the conundrum of one is one, eleven, the palindrome...threefold unfettered
and then there were none, but displaced eternal father and son,
stricken twins, one a gambler, the other a shaman, both stung
by the same Syrian scorpion, but not to die, only to envision
reveries of reverence to revere:  harem, skeleton, tavern
of Baudelaire and Rimbaud in non-local convergence after-burn.

Helium dirigibles dreamt by a goblets’ still
cupped hands.  Ruptured firmaments to relieve the pressure
of anchored chords,
the weight of umbilical mud, the stilted time and radiant spelt grain
in the heat of foreign summers, the early Easter weathers spent in caves,
all the forgotten illness of the sexed, the drunken, and the dead.

On New Year’s Eve of the natural year,
the day before Mother Earth was conceived,
the Holy Grails, in transmigration,
eat zeppelin-shaped fish,
anchovies on Pythagorean triangles,
making high-pitched
Mickey Mouse quips about quacks.
A spilled salt shaker of wit, the stuff  of salvation, salves
the elemental fabric, which has no taste buds for shooting stars.
It’s the pure image of a stillborn still-life, an overlooked prop
in a celestial cinematic still, by all, but the buddy system,
collectors of transitional moments, phase space constellations,
which smile the shape of  a bow, the rib of  Adam given
to woman, so she can play him like a swollen violin.
Before the final course of the 101 curriculum begins,
the blood line paints roses and plus signs into one
pagan pentagram on the periodic table
draped with the flag of Africa’s portal,
waiting for their saucers to be fully filled
with after dinner mug shots,
before they bolt, before they book
Gehenna’s Uncle Sam
for trying to nick the pentagram
to thieve the old amethyst
of the new Jerusalem
from the Lamb, King of the beasts,
the Prince of Peace, a priest.
A faithful and true white stallion
fruitful and multiplying
as if a self-tripped gigolodeon
after having crushed the serpent’s cranium.

Nothing rising from the ashes not expelled to the stars,
nothing from the frequent explosion at the center of itself,
nothing cubed in crystalline,
nothing beaten from the heart, not documented.
Nothing.
A memory is suspended in liquids perfumed in the interstellar wind,
captured unwittingly in the brittle geometry of sacred oils
and canvas slack in doldrums of  parabolic ruminations
about the rising and falling,
and the logorhythmic tittering of gold rain.
The architect of linear tomorrows
is
cuckolded by the valentine gap
of a woman’s womb.