anis shivani

Soraya

 38.  

Patch reef our morning paternoster landed

us on, like paupers excluded from pavane

among the patriots of desktop publishing,

describes, Soraya, the indigo Munch we

mummified for the multitudes: rus in urbe,

red channel to sagittal crest, Sadduccees

betting on safety razors, the sago palm

inside our salaryman’s Saladin caste mark.

To foretell your blancmange prepuce, my

Rawalpindi razzia ended in kill zone razzle

dazzle. I know, Soraya, the June bug juku,

I know Houdini’s hourglass late hours, I know

gynecoid gypsies whose ground effect is

gracile government, silk surplus on tablets.

 
67.

They accuse me of being a wiccan, if not

a parody of widow’s weeds darkening the

burghers of West Bengal like unrecognized

passwords. They fault me, Soraya, of being

pastoralist to arcadia’s archetypical angels of

honesty, archenemy to honest women honed

by god’s homosocial wit or Honecker’s tunnel

of love. I am the tuning fork for steel alibis

upperclassmen love. Yoked with camelot

forebrain, singled out like force majeure after

a storm of peer reviews, pedant among cross-

ing pedestrians, I resist, Soraya, theologians

in Theodora’s court, mala fide absorption

into the bubble economy of camphor trees.

79.

That was a greeting card for greyhounds

caught in the Gregorian calendar, green

fee our Gresham’s Law knew nothing

about: Soraya as go-go futurologist at

peace in the fourth estate’s funhouse is

as distillated as fragile X syndrome. So

don’t trespass the fosse along empyrean

spirit lamps, we are flannel for earflaps.

I dream of the gawky Gatling gun, mash

note you sent me, Soraya, after the masque

ended on a note of purpure masjids, the

purlieu around the FTSE index color-

coded for my cane chair candidacy:

heredity brings forth ice cold hepcats.

92.

What is cerebral dominance? The ginger-

bread bank, to which the helots come hop-

scotching, is ingravescent lambada, only

laminate for kronos: Soraya, is your belt-

tightening as awakened as Avogadro’s

Law? I agree, concrete universals can be

concupiscent if not watched like deer.

I fade like the decrescendo of deep brain

stimulation. Among the instrumentation

associated with pulsating keiretsu: in-

oculum for inquisitors general, late hours

in the house church, gunpowder falling

on stony ground, Soraya’s atonal atlas

of reliable dipsomania, seasick regimen.

The bustle we heard on the way out, of

course it’s what bushwhacking ends in,

Christian names as lively as chow mein,

the gap between Coltrane and free jazz,

effable gaia singing to the greyhounds.

I lost my black book in the columbarium,

Soraya, at last stranded like a Moorish

fantasy, nothing more than folk memory.

They came bearing empires of poison,

and I had no choice but to be ikebana

in someone else’s interior monologue:

lexic for method acting, Soraya, phago-

cyte on the loose, petroglyph to whom

Proteus replied, which was all the time.