Addison Bale
Chimera
I am so curious about the guillotine and the spectacle of its function
its member I should say its unthinking blade that I imagine
is silken through howls and howls very blunt to reason
very sharp very sharp for sure. I imagine myself naked on a pedestal
(though I’m not sure that’s standard) if my body would look fiendish
up there. Wriggly. If my dead-duck penis would look dead and silly.
If it would still be an object albeit changed object of sexual potential
or now a tube, a hilarious notion. If my belly would bloat like a dung beetle
before the drop from gas and lonesomeness. If my ass and legs
would be sludged with my body’s new vacancy.
If jerk or slice. Shrivel or stiffen. Growth over between gore
resisting sheen of metal rusting newly eventual rust rust and rust-
colored there they’d watch that thing pool in a bulrush basket.
*
I am so curious about the Marseillaise. To have a deadly sin
and to accept, yes, it will come malaise despite more eyes.
Pleased with fantasies of the ownerless body and a good clean finish
they screech ovation! And, would they? Touch their fingers
to their necks? Prey for their vulnerable parts, for their rubbing
fear of reputations. For prisons. I would have been made
a benign maladie of the brotherly night would have held my own
body into my own arms writing wholly in love wholly a part of
and abandoning embarrassment, penning lastly
the milliner in spite of judgment for a laugh.
Addison Bale‘s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Wedgie Magazine and the Pomeroy Poets Anthology. He is the founder of the Lit Club at the Light Club poetry reading series in Burlington, VT, and now lives in New York City.
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