The Whole Thing

CE Chaffin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 08:00:15 +0000

is a nimiety of untold proportions,
a whirling globe of radishes, a carnival
with a trillion barkers, a moon braying
at a palm forest, a thousand-eyed politician,
numberless embalmers clutching brake fluid,
a porcine ballerina twirling toward light speed
like a gyroscopic ham, how pumpkin seeds
coat everything, the evaporation of water,
salt crust of a diminishing bog,
carnivorous plants inside a Gorgon wig,
the extinction of dinosaurs, the Dodo holocaust,
the extrapolation of malformed frogs,
a nimbus of maggots around the rubber center
of a golf ball with its shiny dimples
reflecting out like radar dishes,
the stainless steel contraption we dreamed
did everything, the ultimate Swiss Army Knife,
a Hoover with a million attachments
for soldering and colonoscopy and carpet cleaning
and for dusting the crystal hagiography of churches
gone wild in denominational merging to form
the great amoeaba, a church to end all churches,
a giant gumball rolling down a farm road
picking up feathers and cigar stubs and all manner of vegetables,
growing monstrously large like an irradiated butter squash,
unshrinkable, always in motion, accreting substance
of sand, shells, gravel, straw, burrs, stuck
to its expanding surface like hemagglutinin spikes
on a virus, a thing of absolute obesity
gobbling souls like popcorn while canisters
uncoil films into the ultimate movie,
bigger than Citizen Kane, a chambered nautilus
of action figures, special effects and nausea,
the smell of charred spaceships with Chanel No. 5,
an illimitable outbreak of potentiality
attracting everything, repelling nothing,
having more gravity than anything,
an all-absorbent ball of paper towels
that sucks us through its porous skin
as a frog does oxygen, a sticky thing,
a caramel apple of prodigious girth,
taking the shape of a sphere because
it is the most economical shape
(though it cares nothing about economy)
as it eclipses the global GDP in its relentless
overbearing on everything at once,
pressing down on our collective foreheads,
depressing eyelids with fishing weights,
insatiable superplanet sucking comets and moons
into a giant pelican’s crop vaster than all habitable oceans
on all habitable planets, a vacuum bag
plastered about with a million hummingbird wings,
an all-encompaassing space-time turkey
obliterating the Big Bang with greasy drippings,
stuffing itself with the crumbs of galaxies,
rolling unchallenged through the observable
and unobservable universe, but perverse enough
to fuck with you personally if you take it that way.

The Whole Thing is a post from: Pif Magazine

Prayer to La Virgen

CE Chaffin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 07:00:56 +0000

La Virgen de Guadalupe’s chintzy frame,
gold tinsel nuggeted with colored lights,
flashes in concert with the cricket outside.

Las Vegas lives too much in Mexico;
I should be accustomed to the glitz.
The people here are poor, the light is rich

and yet this cheezy, plastic abomination
(as if we must re-decorate creation,
send current to the stars, postmark our prayers

with giant stamps of Kennedy from Yemen)
is too much for one brought up Lutheran.
Pray for me, Virgen de Guadalupe,

pray I may understand the body electric
of your cheap Chinese-manufactured light–
though I was thinking how many Virgins here

and rarely an illuminated Christ.
The Son eclipsed by some maternal right?
Yet when the whole family went to fetch him,

thinking he’d lost his ever-loving mind,
he insisted on the resurrection
and only Mary went to see him climb.

Funny how at the end, friends, kin desert us,
not meaning to offend or even hurt us;
it’s blatant suffering that drives them from us

unless some wealthy stranger overcome us
and lay us in a grave prepared for him.
It’s unexpected light I love, Virgen.

Prayer to La Virgen is a post from: Pif Magazine

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The Whole Thing

Prayer to La Virgen