The heart measures in blood everything that happens.
– Ramón Gomez de la Serna

The dragon stays stuck to lampposts at the
boundaries, but looks like a mountain lizard. The
ancient poet stays in the ear, but the ink he pisses is
invisible. Emptiness stays in the river drunk on
wheat and reflects back what we thought was
dumped in the thick of a December Wednesday.
The Black Water Dragon sits in the Black Walnut
tree but the last leaf hangs on as if w/ fangs. The
old poet sings of the world that lies beyond the human
but gets no taste ‘til death. The heart stays in the
chest but appears at night as a constellation
orchestrating movement of silver-colored blood
that gains velocity in water years.

The politician stays
in the middle & the middle moves so far right can’t
see its shadow can’t tell the poem from rhetoric
can’t feel blood when it gets past the hat can’t pass
the hat to the campesinos and the amnesia gallops
in to start it all again in animal rhythm impervious
to grief.

Scorn stays west of the left ventricle
the poet says and sees it stuck there unable to
mutter anything but GRAHHR or
muuurrrrrffffffffff so writes a poem that becomes a
series of poems that becomes a house and a whole
slum of them headed for the same plight (evening)
stuck in the shithole of his imagination up near the
top of the monkey puzzle tree next to the Octopus
paxarbolis to wile away the January afternoon
hoping not to become lunch for Sasquatch/lost in
the dust of a library archive waiting to return in
another incarnation or vivid hallucination.

The Black Dragon
waiting for the poem to end
burns the bacon to a crisp.

12:03P – 1.12.12
After Xi Chuan’s Somebody and Li Bo Questions Answered