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Tuesday, October 12, 2021

Will Alexander

 Song in Barbarous Fumarole of the Japanese Crested Ibis


The wings pierce as if they were eternity.
—Shuzo Takiguchi

The Japanese Crested Ibis is now extinct.

“To claim as arcane vapour
ruination by intrigue
by kindled leprosy morays
so that I take up in my glottis
these moral hallucinogens which actively dim
which nourish themselves on behalf of active heavenly terror

as if forking my verbs with cryptography
with bird interrogation
with a haunted crystallography of deception
mentally cross-fertilized with defective aural lobotomies   
so that I momentarily sing
with a cosmic catch in my wings

floating above
a black waterfall of rye
dazzled by partial torments
by seeming in-seminal scatterings   
by snow in smoking germinal mazes

it could be said that my blood has been scorched
by intensive Venusian plasma   
by updrafts of wheat
by molecules that slaughter
my throat continuously parched   
by wild in-secular genetics   
by unfiltered parchment   
by incipient nerve cuisines   
empowered by listless cranial singing
carving androgynous shapes with my voice
me
an ominous fluttering angel   
kept aloft by diagrams
of smouldering electrical truth

(EXCERPT)

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