poem || John Pursch

According to Manatees

 

Unfurled captive aerosol groupers

swim freely into store-bought youth

containment vestiges of itchy hallways,

flossing coral feelers clean off

the beefy round surf line hurlers

before blurred cave-inching parties

can dabble in fleeced retainer juice

capitulation drool.

Heaven smirks down

on notarized munitions deals,

compounded to farmland bustle

and stubbed to stuntman kitsch,

discarding flavored offhand wanderers

with just so much penitential dust,

governed by owl heat.

So much for capital punishment,

banished by pugilists

from dog house tender fleets

of wooden macadamized nougat,

borne dourly on the saving crests

of frothy diplomatic yarns,

from Slower Pindropia

to Cauchy’s Deviled Hamster’s

pejorative denouement,

sold to cake queens

in cowering indignant paginal sundries,

heading for plainly coated

inguinal preparatory nun’s hens.

According to manatees who visit the tendrils

of regret machines in semi-annual dry-dock,

lockets left by sounding parties

in the crunch of Frowsy Isthmus Repair (circa 1407)

have recently been turning up in radical card rooms

near the port of Breadly O’Simian,

in frivolous waves of crimson detrital flood jets,

known hourly to local sandwich vendors as

Ankle Shim Express Entendre Souffle

or Cremation’s Final Kith.