Fitzroy's Moral Collapse

alle kunst ist umsunst wenn der engel auf dem zundloch brunst
(all technology is in vain if the angel urinates on your musket)
—Austrian folk poem

it is stifled during that first marinading of the Congo
that a humongous Black Man encroached all in fur-lurks
in the ochres for white women
in vapid trails of fortnum ectoplastic whereupon
He wouldst rush to gripe upon their birdbones in transports
of shuddering & lissome delight

.....................................for such Christian middens
.....................................whose vapours always uppermost

& inveigled & even & unto the lateness of the Ireland
such fettled behoof is as those sauvages
squint inholy trees of trinity affront the passages of
.....................High English Women
....................upon whom to inrush

with many urges—eek now it is spake in sech North Americanas
where chestheaded men still lilt and loll in the frontwoods
of Vermouth and Moorish Caliphorn in long quackgrasses
as shy big birds parlay wildly for the extrusion

................................of bonneted females
................................from their wagons below
whence errant junglee wildness of this order saw also
Darwin observe in his fritter such a general finching
of life and aquatic erotortoise during his inchaunting
of the galapageese as would give him cause to flutter
and take heart—in the guise of a vast bird

..................he would stoop into Fitzroy's cabin there
..................to demand more pumpkins
be allocated to some dying damned lizards
on the foredeck
(where it is recorded that he would prefer to perform
his morning daunce of the galapagine finchfather)

Fitzroy's reply is from scripture & to the äffect that such
lézardice has now no place in the lives of elder men
whose wives yet abide
in their flossing bosoms of yeastertide

this in its askance
is his moral claps


(Published in Burning Gorgeous anthology 2010)

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