Embedded Files
The Eastern Sheet
A leaping icebreaker’s landfall.
Hugged by plastron greyhounds, archaic slack,
we flail in the ether:
cookie silicate.
Have no others come here to gasbag,
or leave you with a peevish boar
upraising your globiferous breccia?
Have you no menagerie, o darksome bunny?
Coleoptera-husks; shillings of momentum;
joviality towering over the springe—
no biscuit, no death-worm, no timoneer nor supellex
as antagonist.
Leggings
Siliceously as a misaccount,
realities plunge into silhouette…
A repetend’s ianthine regularity, no match
for lodes banked in flammeous
pockets. And trenchant
for a chapel’s fallen flamen
kitsch is—
the onomatope worth any grant.
Leash it,
this cleeking and this burring,
but let the onhanger do it, who
spits ovarioles to hinder.
Twill and twill
(agitated herons and smoking sows
bleeding fictions!) and adamic,
until the brike of logos be wound
unwhite as a misaccount.
Then, candied with cauterised dropsy, a perfervid crypt
might seduce some constellate capybaras—
reliable capias for souls that step
their leggy yowls into the nopalry.
Repoussé with Rivets
The wilt produced a slubbing soup
and mowed sarcasts to the mean.
But I can’t condone such steamy,
segregating levelling of the marsupium,
no matter what brings us to the seam.
Flagons, weepers. And cypseline aldermen
whose scherenschnitte shares the nail’s lazy
tyranny; they draw me into haematemesis almost.
When modest siestas in Sumatran drenchings
yield, sun-silver ripples us
asyllabical…
Mucilaginous barter! with the blained gorgons
and the cynical, Himalayan Netflickers,
and beccaccias busy with stoccado and toparchy.
The pongee I entertained once and then quit—
I worship now its singular, wilted rindle.
Finally, a menagerie in which all can be mused,
cooling the civility I purchased from scalenous ungulates
sprigged and smothered.
The montant cuts through the deluge
with a gully’s gaucherie… there, beyond the dynamite
I hear whiny flakes of Sappho, like this sump,
and wilt could not hold more steamy source.
Paraglide
Of a steamrolled beatitude bevelled
syzygially, diathermanous spondees of a whelk,
like apothecaries rushing to bedash,
may find the recourse weedy in their kilts.
Abraiding the feint the clicket shelds,
the aforementioned lie wary of managerial integration,
for what the acronyms skim also undercuts one’s toga
and co-opts the handiwork of purpure reprehension.
But from within its bract how can the tonic tell
when proto-morology shall flood
one’s pilotage? How despised is the lignite
that shall not rout, how barefaced the crow’s cavorilievo?
As, when stupefacient in that antecedaneous bleach,
your heft, unsaddled by such pulverations, already
holoblastic and ajar, poops, among brumal rosolio,
a whiz-bang parasite for the papish wallaroos.
Stuart Cooke’s latest book is The grass is greener over your grave (2023). He lives in Brisbane, Australia, where he is Associate Professor of Creative Writing & Literary Studies at Griffith University.
Copyright © 2025 by Stuart Cooke, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
Report abuse