Charivari

A madman is selling stray cats in an open-air market
for those that inhabit ancient cities where all
goes undisturbed inside their walls. By traffic’s sleek
melodies, he is led to a door which leads nowhere
though he theorizes its threshold may be the event horizon
that will trigger a violent revolution among the starving.

He demands marriage of a cabbage, that the starving
young might be fed by his own offspring sold in markets
along the Buenaventura River. As smog lifts off the horizon,
his vegetables would ripen in their beds, far from shopping malls;
indeed our tale crops up on the occidental edge of nowhere
where all play regardless of persuasion. Cabbage, radish, leek

and man are all well fed, well rooted, pink and sleek.
‘Tis a garden of lovers, far from the executioner’s starving
sword, the charred corpses of banned books. Know where
lovers and scholars grow equally fond of cats. Market
purring and pulchritude, he tells his would-be wife. All
night, flora and fauna caper along the celestial horizon.

The underground emerges to become dry land. The horizon
weighs every word, nothing is usual. Our strays grow sleek
with leisure for all day fur tonguings – they deposit hair balls
delicately into cairns to mark bygone days of starving.
Satiated young play Red Rover, recite piggy-goes-to-market.
Scholars write erotic poems for lovers – but nowhere

does this walled city exist with its cabbage gardens, nowhere
is the horn of the huntsman insulated in birdsong. Horizon-
tally, the fiery tails of missiles slash the sky, mark it
with tallies for the newly dead. Clangorous clergy leak
gray-coiled murders from swinging censers. 24,000 starving
die each day. Still, the madman hopes for it all,

endless bedsheets and beechnut gum. He dreams tall –
his clairvoyance might save the hanged man, know where
to find the strumming of balalaikas. Amidst the starving,
he seeks opera houses and nickelodeons. His horizons
birth a frenzy of dawns, cradle a moon baby sleek
with multiple possibilities until an observer chooses to mark it.

A madman haunts the poultry-market, pecking at the feet of all
supplicants. Roads sleek with the hammer of rain go nowhere
nearer the event horizon. He stuffs his pockets with rolls, starving.
from east to west