The murderer uses evil to kill people.
What’s that look like, that thing ‘evil’ – how’s it work?
Is it an idea, or a death ray? Is it a curse?
Oh, I see. You don’t mean evil is a thing
(I wonder whether you mean anything)
but you’ll be damned before you let on that you know
that what the murderer killed with was a gun.
’There are squirrels…’ I began. The muse said, ‘Stop with the squirrels.’
I erased what I had written. I said, ‘Now what?’
No answer. The muse whistled. Aeons passed
in review. Real squirrels outside ran up a real tree.
The muse reclined, declining a tray of verbs.
‘Don’t go fancy,’ the muse said. ‘I wasn’t.’ Muse said, ‘Were.’
‘Live in the moment,’ the muse said. ‘Forget fear.
You make yourself sick worrying what might happen.’
‘Don’t,’ I answered. ‘Often,’ said the muse.
‘Write down exactly what it is you feel.’
‘I don’t feel,’ I said. The muse looked at me: ‘Won’t.’
The window on the forest side of the room
blew open, inward. Papers flew and fell.
‘There goes my work’ I said. The muse said, ‘Swell.’
Translate the following sentence using correct tenses:
‘I, or perhaps more precisely my brain, was interpreting amodal codes with my (our?) intraparietal sulcus when Javier popped in to say the barn had burned down.’
For extra credit translate the same sentence into English.
There are squirrels the size of similes. Rats pose as metaphors.
A gerbil is being a gerund. Slant rhymes recline in jars.
On the never edge of everywhere mute phonemes ply the trade
of participles who have got a royal flush in spades.
The sun comes up the way it must in legendary tales.
Storms blow away the wind itself and adverbs tally pails
of overindulgent modifiers Hemingway would hate.
The full stops start a race across where angles hesitate.
Ellipsisically in threes they trot. Alone they cannot fend
off question marks like this that marks what surely is the end?
The squirrels in this bird nest are marginalising the snakes.
We measure the nest. It must have been a very big bird.
We fashion a podium determined to do what it takes.
We clamour for silence in a fey futile wish to be heard.
The snakes glisten. They listen, we think, with their darting forked tongues.
The squirrels chatter on, scatter off, commandeer the dry places.
The water wraiths rise and make light of our ladder’s low rungs.
The serpentine similes formed by our moistening boot laces
give signals we sapiens and serpents and squirrels are in deep
in this nocturnal nonsense disturbing what should be our sleep.
’Open your eyes,’ they tell me, ‘if you want to sleep.
It will anchor you in a Somewhere and a Now.’
I try to. I imagine I see a ceiling
and curtains – not deep space and unicorns.
I tire. I close my eyes. All hell breaks loose
contaminating Earth like humans do.
Alone on the shore of a beautiful, dead sea,
on a beach where plastic trash hides tar-smeared sand,
I stand in a crowd just like me and we scream.
There’s no life but us to hear us. Scream. Again.
