Pungent Fumes, Unusual Fortunes

Ten Psalms of Natural Science

I.

Flamingos howling in the night
Emasculate the caustic irony
Of self-important critics
Whose testes of wordsmithery shrivel
Amidst the piercing screams
Of those Floridian waterfowl...  

Peacocks? Peacocks be damned!  

II.

Half-sleeping, one recalls horror-filled sausages:

Sweet, sweet bitter juices ofjoy
Trickle like treacle gone awry
Sting like sunbaked cement
Slap! smack! the shuddering startled buttocks of
Previously unexamined questions.

Questions about love. Questions about beans.

III.

Morbidity, sordid and slow,
Tremendous in its reluctance
To tip a hat,
To take a gentlemanly bow
Instead spits seed-hulls---ptuiiouiii!---
While sauntering by, lost in mesmerizing,
Boyish daydreams of a grand Vacuum.

IV.

I believe that I swallowed some kryptonite
Mistaking it for green sugar candy
It was rough going down
My what a surprise to discover
The number of survivors among us from Kal-el’s home planet.
They fold upon themselves as I pass them on the street
Eyeballs rolling haplessly
Awkwardly, I smile and hurry by…  

I ate some gelatin, too, but to no ill affect.
So strange the way it wiggles, in cubes.  

V.

Photosynthesis
Is a beautiful thing.
Nothing compares to that conversion of light to cellular delectables.
By association, it evokes a diagram of the cycle of water:
Arrows rambling in the laziest of circles point the way
From cloud to lake, from lake to cloud, from cloud to lake…
Photosynthesis reminds me too of
Rust.
Transistors.
A jar with holes in its lid hosting a vainglorious cocoon.  

VI.

Tremulous…
Is it joy, is it pride?
Is it egomania?
Or is it a magmic dissolution at work
That liquifies this facial rock?
That overwhelms the semblance of airs
Too easily perceived as joy, as pride,
As egomania?

Or it may be something sinister,
Simple and void of puffery: physical pain.  

VII.

Stirrings, subtle at the periphery
Are not so, not so at all at closer proximity.
This pleasant enough vibration, a purr,
Is a distant echo of the tumult at epicenter--
The wildest melodrama.  

Digestion, implosion, expulsion…release.

VIII.

Squids squirt their fluids
Not as effortless charm
Not for the cost-efficient production of ink
Nay, and not out of vanity--
But in a spasm, jolted by fear.  

It is a practical form of incontinence.
A dark, liquid variant of the porcupine’s quills
The skunk’s stinking spray
The racing heart.  

IX.

A single whirling dervish is a freak
But in company, a graceful organic ballet.

Similarly, gastric juices are unsavory
Removed from their systemic context.  

Grapefruits are fiends.

X.

Gullible, I may be.
Frantic my visage (and if I see it myself I laugh).
Each moment has its own happenstance of drama
Each chemical bond its quiet transition.
The scooting sound of a folded paper toy
Follows a well-aimed flick from a boy’s thumb-cocked finger.
Do these crystals scratch the throat?
Do they endlessly reproduce in a splay of arithmetic?
Somewhere—-there, way beyond the imagined there—
Is there a gassy emission
Or some odd swelling of temperature
That takes notice?

Gullible, I may be.
Frantic my visage (nudge me if it slips my mind to laugh).