Randolph Healy: from 'Scales'

X

The chances of men of different races
having crystal structure and shallow roots
drive the experiment whose bells are
unearned favours synonymous with
language like the ant all at least 50th
cousins frightening and lonely they only
collect fortified border checkpoints and
never use the reasoners who became
weapons in the bartender's desire to
prevent the stutterer from hearing his or
her own voice by striking a lava cobble
against spiders who make dialectical
tribes histrionic narcissistic dependent as
the faces became cobwebs out of naked
men in last year's nests their own
substance making little soup but
nevertheless the bee takes a bone flute
found about thirty thousand years ago in
the middle course a tabula rasa covered
with invisible writing when love grows
thin as it gathers its material from the
flowers of the garden and field but
transforms and digests it by a power of its
own.

XI

50% of reality
or an apple
or box
or part of the code
or gender
or nothing at all

people are god's hobby said Margaret boxes
full of bones rolls and rolls of skin he
just keeps making them

tall slim dark
short stocky pale
the same old macram

a worm's idea of the sea
rivalling a river
ploughing through the storm
where time's daughters
grasp at wasps
and break into bleak laughter

vergent di/con

just to keep making and unmaking them

if women have ovaries she asked
do men have underies?

anxious fuchsia ocean

XII

zeitgeist in a time capsule kind
ling a skeleton sprinkled with
sugar here a grotto there a
weasel winging it as a chess
piece in the thrall of skin on loaned
information north south east west
everywhere a hurricane

old mac dozing at the helm
skirts the letter zeroes the
living expensive fictions oil
ing his frying pan and on that
onslaught zephyrs mate then hit the
gravy behind an esker in
an alcove where clumsy martyrs
scrape a history iconic

cliquish where dunked generations
raced under a climax singing
subdominant to tonic mutton
to magic under the carpet
so much intelligence so much
crap in the original snakes
but no ladders the older the
game the more is left to cadence