Isthmus Crypticus

Bird Shrine ~ John Jude Palencar

Your scarecrow legs rise from grain husk dusted shoes
Laces long gone to the pyramid of empirical needs
Or perhaps confiscated by caring state officials
Corn teeth rattle in the face of the interrogating wind
Hand-hurled insults at the dunes’ feverish knife edges
Sand-blasting skin burnt umber and amber return
Confessions fall unbidden from the lip of the storm
Strangers loom rigging in the azure haze horizon

And the prow of their boat hits the wet sand silent
Beneath the crash of the waves on the sentinel reef
Smuggled bouquets of seaweed and dead coral swinging
On the arm of this parabolic and pissed-off muse
Whose head full of haloes and hard-on dead-lines
Demands to be rescued from the sleeping undergrowth
The grey cursed sky and serrated shoreline agree
To split the difference while flesh still remains

Here on the headland of hate stick-scratched in the sand
Hallowed ground is hailed slandered and deranged
Hermit crabs scuttle on the dotted line foaming
Detailed design for the sea’s edge stitch hemmed

No scared crows or sacred cows to tin the morning hope
No kidding crop circling alien ambivalent and aching
The cultivation of need hangs on the arm of the thrasher
A child gazes up at your hook-and-eye tweed-chested jacket
You hiss through those teeth scaring pale moon face
Breathless as stitches entwined in a forgotten blue day
Your hands hold nothing but the waters of time
Bartering days between hell and high waterline

For who would till this barren and saline finger
What woodenhead cryptic and contrary soul
With driftwood face and charcoal eyes
Fleshed from the nightmares of children and dogs
Would populate this isthmus of buried memories
Rotten and raw with the taste of love lost
In the sand that blows from a waning moon
A pedigree for the damned, the sowing too soon?


Title from one of those excellent episodes of Aeon Flux