Bear Versus Whale A Love Nocturne for the Dead

The City of Stamford is filled with giant shells

it is a grave yard of sea creatures from long ago

each spiral staircase a headstone bearing trivialities,

pleasantries and idle chit chat with Death, its new roommate

We walk among the new marianas trench, in a world without light

along Atlantic Street, where the riots started

the first baton was like a shotgunshot, and then noisily,

a flock of wild teeth taking off from the underbrush

The dead crawled out of the pits and morass

The dead crawled, breathing hard, on top of the living

and made sweet love to the music of the setting sun

a chorus of helpless screams, voices ragged with panic

Now we stay holed up in our bedroom with a rifle as a candle

The pressure of the marianas trench can crush a japanese phone book in half

It is a hungry sumo wrestler, but his fat body is made of zombies

and the bowl of rice only has one or two grains left

and the sumo wrestler is Stamford, stabbing at rice with chopsticks,

frustrated and mindless, a thousand students taking the SATs in unison

watching TV in unison, farting in unison, their limbs

in unison falling to the floor, lying for three days

and then arising anew, the christ of the holocaust

bringing date-rape to all that they may be reborn again

staggering up the spiral of a giant shell

tireless sleeping eyes rolled back

the giant cage spinning and the Lucky-Six-Six-Six numbers

are drawn by Vannah White, your limbs tied to the wheel, spinning

your number is up, and dollar signs are drawn crudely

on the ping-pong-ball eyes of the zombie at your door

It's like listening to your neighbors hump,

but instead of having sex they throw like dead fruit

their rotten bodies against the walls of your mind

their fingertips through a crack in the door, like live shrimp

For days this goes on, the crack wider,

and the shrimp becomes an eel, becomes a shark,

foul cold breath crawling over your barricade

a school of kung-fu fists come punching, tearing, biting

the air smells of gunpowder and ejaculate

it is a painful moment of freedom from repression

as you are all fists now too, stroking your hard gun

the thudding is your heart is flying kung-fu

In FLAMES! You're a MAN, a MAN!

it revs like a motorcycle engine

and your body is in the sumo ring,

your weight an angry bear attacking an ancient whale

But the sumo city is bigger than the sumo ego

and the angry bear is smaller than the ancient whale

and your corpus is a phone book, names, addresses, the numbers that matter,

being crushed in half