Coming down
& further down
There was Johnny like a milk snake you've never seen
There was desire like that

Slipping like mercury into a mouth & out
A fish
There was something too

Came from another world but lived in this one
Pity to think

We'd all have been getting somewhere better

If the skink lost its tail
The sky turned the size of a heart

& the thud made when a worker'd get run under

The rig chugging
Like a dulcimer

Crooning
In the dark
Johnny'd had the menthol cooped for years in a big black tub                    

With it he was doing an ersatz of the lord's work
We were doing
When we'd ride shotgun past buckets of porgies giving off

Like a late August killing
There was nothing missing where we'd thought

With sense or not

When a young man went missing & Johnny found him
In the pot

Turned to goop therein

He was no longer missing
We'd tell Johnny there is by law always someone missing

& he'd throw a jab
Elsewhere
His pace had long ago made luck knot up like ivy in his middle

Until it did ill
Half the time & some nights
Johnny willed a bit-of-grace-a-day kind of guy
To him

Coughing
We'd describe realistic kinds of light

To an undertaker's shovel

We'd drink a tonic & see angels throating like toads
In the pond

Singing & singing

Johnny'd snare a bird & strip the parts & make a loaf
Under the moon with the figs

He'd fill with blood with no one color about it
We could well forget
When Johnny got a hang of the jig

Throat-singing in the hot jelly
Light stayed in the fog 
All the night
He looked like a tick waging life on a cow's back

He'd look like a newly-wed fish
He gave a great distance to a complete nothing & was
Cocked & full of manna

Elsewhere beyond the pew in the field

The workers were running in
& knew a thing or two about desire coming up short

Like a bad knifing

On an animal twice its size
They told Johnny he was doing it alright & accidently

They got doing it too
Foot to foot they were making awful good din
They said to Johnny

What you got's the bends in that bread-like space around the heart
That's dark like an outhouse
In a no-moon night
Like a snake

Warmed up crosswise an ax
Across from that was the pond near the pot
Exact & odd & glad & right

Where the passage of time laced its boots too tight
& ate the figs & left its shack

There was yet another Johnny up on the scree
Cutting into porgies

To reckon them right

He was the one churning blood into mud & that mud
Into the mud

From the pond to next
Johnny sucked down smokes like a milk snake on an egg
Saying uncreated what not

& was strangely quiet
Hawing
Near the lathe
He knew the one law said at this time of night

Got to know what work one does in doing such living
So it can be priced
Elsewhere

There was a storm about an hour out
& ago

Glowing like a tugboat

There were virgin corms in bunches that'd be gone

Too
By tomorrow

Bogus man was what Johnny was
Was the one cooked all 'til soft in the pot
Made liquor from their form

Thick as snot
& ate figs by hand in the dawn in the fog
He spoke bog speak
To the workers & the faraway living

Who groaned there's no way knowing
If what you get's true love or a good batch of shade
From what it's not

There was a toad & also 
A fig

A dud

& a bag of dross
Big as a moon on a night good for prayer & bass fishing

Johnny had them going in the pot & was filling it like a deputy
Waiting for a thief

In the arbor
Meanwhile
The workers were chugging

In the rig
Out to the motor
In the arbor
Two of them were thinking of giving the morning a gussy din

With the work of a dulcimer
A porgie's guts'd been spilled of their dead weight
A while before

Johnny'd spiked in his snare & took from it its wind & put its heart
In a toad's mouth

After that

A toad got full & had eyes shining like butter
In the pond

We said a thing about grief & went wild & were gone

__

Under the auspices of a mutual intrigue with the concepts of bardo and gestalt, irrationally self-induce a seizure (it's much easier if you're epileptic) in the comfort of your home, then force yourself to the page to audit the numinous swirl still in your head, and anecdotally, you might end up with lots of material and music to orient. Case in point—what you're reading.