wading on the devil's bar

 "In Goethe's Faust, a chorus of Lemurs who serve Mephistopheles dig Faustus' grave. Lemures may represent the wandering and vengeful spirits of those not afforded proper burial, funeral rites or affectionate cult by the living: they are not attested by tomb or votive inscriptions. Ovid interprets them as vagrant, unsatiated and potentially vengeful di manes or di parentes, ancestral gods or spirits of the underworld."




usually best to roll them into the canyon,
divergent roads using vehicles
as writing nibs
made of iridium, the hardest material
on earth, entering the
police blotter
by high angle rope team extraction
several hundred feet
an old town needle in a haystack writing seminar
no coincidence
i rub my eyes and head to feel the scar
from a devil's pointed shove
down in the 2 am street
bounced down
i sprang up, otherwise a sitting duck
for midnight hunters run amok
returning to the scene for answers
two weaks later
i reborn from my own caesarian extraction,
producing a knife when cornered
to avoid injury
the bouncer told me i could not enter
"to swerve could cause
more dead"
two bucks were the admission charge
two bucks paid to protect
gangster does as want travels thru the dark
i did my own intrepid research,
at the KKclub, told by a slinky doe
the frank owner found them
by finding a cellphone
exhausted breath turnsignaled red
as if the pimp of dozens has more access
to pings
or knows where habeas corpus
pawns the kings of access, exquisite corpses
in failing lingerie,
as the wilderness listens thru a voodoo donuthole
that took out the middle
men, and inserted questions large in the belly,
pregnant with arrows
much like masked stage directions for portlandia
in which mansions saved by longshoremen
share the stage with benson bubblers
giving free hard thinking to all
having heart attacks on the way down
the same weak as mlk
the same tweakers that sent me to emergence rooms
in which surrendered blades
allow catscans that purr under a hood
owned by frank finders of faustian loopholes
wading on the bar
to shovel just
ice into the flames

______

after William Stafford's "traveling thru the dark"
dante, and goethe: too.