Subscribe to Toylit

Friday, March 30, 2012

The Quack's Lament [Today's News Poem by •••/@ten_ten_ten/TJ Edge, March 30, 2012]


The Quack's Lament [Today's News Poem by •••/@ten_ten_ten/TJ Edge, March 30, 2012]
By ••• (TJEdge)(@ten_ten_ten): http://tententen.posterous.com/

in the year of mercury rising
i ate white calomel
and applied salves to syphilis biding
in bodily alleys hid well
as we'd lie to patients sizing
up nostrums to sell

by the coarse cloth of night
we lit pine fat torches
danced hi-diddley-red blue and light
on coal dust-folded porches
stacked in burlap bags of blight
children smearing scorches

the taxman etched lines on my tongue
as into glass i bottled
white mercury powdered with a black lung
from a cracked skin infant who waddled
where mud and meat and flies were hung
and whores were manured and mottled

and in that year of mercury retrograde
we carved in dung and dust
diagrams in the skin of the sun to aid
us in assuming a more fatherly trust
and of many young girls women were made
to satisfy our daughter’d lust

til faces caked with tar and feather
we rode across the briar
horses whipped in blood and lather together
barely escaping the ire
of townspeople writ in cork and leather
with wings of broken fire

we let blood into smoke and chill
and round an empty mine
they strung us up and did their will
packed our bodies in brandy and brine
without even a hole to fill
fated thus, born under a mercuric sign

holding hands with mercury and sun we go
where hell wobbles to and breathes us fro

“Mercury may be hiding water ice, NASA spacecraft finds”
MSNBC, Space.com, 3/27/2012 3:28:39 PM ET
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46871204/ns/technology_and_science-space/#.T3Yvsl1lJF8
“Retired Pharmacist Arrested in Albany Mercury Poisoning Case”
Paul Grondahl, Times Union.com, Updated 01:57 p.m., Friday, March 30, 2012


Return to Toylit
Subscribe to Toylit

Friday, March 23, 2012

…and here be tygers [Today's News Poem by HikiMadwoman, March 23, 2012]


and here be tygers [Today's News Poem by HikiMadwoman, March 23, 2012]

in the mountained mouth of northeast asia, an empty gray tooth marks north korea
one red pin marks a model city, painted clean without pity, the lovely pyongyang
stuffed with concrete girls and empty tilt-a-whirls smelling of blood and dark urea
fringed 'round with wooden spooned schools, where watered women in hanboks sang


i have watched the young man mountains surrounding pyongyang's potent potted smile
holding silted rivers sleeping flanks with their banks free of boats neatly curled
in roofless shopping cart valleys stamping out the arduous march for another mile
pocked 'round with unknown holes, dead wells perforating their white paper world


in another map i found a name for the wooden saint plastic paint model railroad town
and named collective farms, plaster dams and coalmine arms, all drawed out in blue
prison camp lines sketched famine fine and where they lay the tin missiles down
i drank of jet fuel and submarines, and climbed the steppes of golden mount baekdu


there these sleepy-limbed sons of korgyo kings spoke in fury and threatened hell
from a republic of none and nuclear sun, red revolution in a boot on our neck
yet in rare photos i saw, a child playing in straw, an infant grasping a pale shell
two girls giggling pink at a sink, and a grand old man with a donkey in check


i knew them in one bright flash, and furious, i ask, how could it be the case
we could have forgotten there are people living and laughing in this place?

http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20120323-700094.html


Return to Toylit
Subscribe to Toylit