Holy War

Senses run where pain requires them:
a canker sore, for instance, eats a crater
in my tongue and multiplicities of cells
divide, synapses battle hard – catapulting
and careening to procure at least a partial
victory: a holy war: a battleground, and more,
where stings and stabs impel – belligerently
stoked to hell, indifferently relieved: a venue
for biology to rule and heave: a military
school which specializes in reconnaissance:

spy missions aimed at prodding, probing,
reconfiguring the actual and metaphoric
loins and testes of the multivalent me:
full of chromosomal pesties that convene
in their innumerable millions to consume
and generate an energy which in its roiling
wide totality sweeps here and there and there
and here and seems by chance to
gather up and find among its minds an odd
excuse for “Unity.” I’m interested in misery:

its upturned carts and frightened horses –
imminent divorces and ramshackle jerry-built
solutions lasting for an hour or two before
resorting to yet more rash slapdash plastering
of holes in walls against at least a tiny
portion of its fright. My soft sore tissue
will cry out today and through the night
and on into another dawn: perhaps until a war
it wants to think is holy radiates some whiff
of an aroma of a possibility it could be won.


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