Lady Menagerie's Heart Tinkles Like Glassware
She's a thermometer of sensitivity. She sees
the dew in the morning and breaks into a sweat
because she thinks the grass has got a fever
she doesn't want to catch. The world for Lady Menagerie
is never a crying three year old wandering alone naked
through the gauntlet of road kill some computer in Colorado
has made of her family, or, nearer to home, the neighbour's god.
There are no blackflies in Lady Menagerie's honey.
She's a cult of fanatical translucency and if
it doesn't smell like sandalwood incense and Patchouli
it's not the fragrance of a real flower.
Lady Menagerie is a starmap of chandeliers.
A one-eyed aesthete. If you tell her that the moon's
cratered like the pit of a peach, that every falling star
isn't a sign to wish upon with the benign intentions
of a celestial midwife, that sometimes, predictably,
they're astronomical catastrophes bent on her extinction,
she'll call out the thought police of the Vatican
and accuse you of molesting her pristine psyche
by painting pictures on the lens of her mind,
So you only point your telescope, hooded like a falcon,
at the robin's egg blue of the chicory growing by the side of the road.
You don't mention the turkey vultures in pathology
operating like undertakers doing an autopsy
in a seventeenth century Dutch operating theater
huddled around the cadaver of a dismembered squirrel. Dark physical energies, only dark to the mind,
are the muses the body sings for with unfabricated bliss.
Lady Menagerie is gushing like a galactic sprinkler
with lyrics she's writing for the cosmic hiss.
She was hurt at one time. The abyss made an impact.
And ever since she's bathed in a crater of nanodiamonds
to renew the virginity of the light that's been soiled by shadows.
Rage is a pariah. Grief's a pariah. Intensity, danger, risk.
Chaos, conviction, despair, doubt, honest unknowing,
The dark's a pariah. The firefly in the dragon mask.
Aging, changing, solitude, the black mirrors
of enlightened heretics she can't see herself in
she has so scrubbed, and expunged, bleached and effaced
the dark side of the moon she's erased herself
like a spray bomb with a concrete message
under a busy overpass of traffic and trash.