Greenland Frost Camel
James Grinwis
It comes. It is the worst thing
you ever imagined because it has
no conscience. It runs around
with the green sliding off its back
and every one votes for him
because he is a camel. If I’m talking
about a camel it means
I’m not thinking about anything.
Just sitting around, drinking
my tea and asparagus, chewing the verbs that
my right hand places in front of my ear.
There are no citizens living inside it.
I hope this is true because my ear
is like a banana with no nutrition. It appears
to be screwed on correctly as is a banana
but it is a blot of tar and lemon rinds.
The vacuity that slides down is a toy lemon
with an engine run by the Greenland frost camel.
That green bastard. Kill me.
Like diamonds, like working with them
in the vagaries of going left then right,
then into the tube-swept landscape
and upturning some turnips
who weren’t asking to be turned
because it’s no fun. No fun is the stratagem
of my favorite house. My house is my favorite
because it has a dog and a monkey.
The monkey is me. The dog has a name
that rhymes with smoke. Smoke with an “ie”
sound at the end of it. Thank you for deferring
but it’s too late damn you you bigger more successful
monkey.
The afternoon light gets late
and I’m still squinting into a paper
that makes less sense than the neologism
nobody knows. I’m the neologism
that nobody knows, because it’s part of the dreams
of shrouded women and their orgasms.
My house is not an orgasm.
Too bad for the house. And the orgasm.
There is a red carpet.
There is a red carpet the dog sleeps upon
and then leaves, which is not too cool
for the people who live in the carpet.
They wear strange hats
and their exoskeletons glisten.
That is why they nibble on dogs
and ankles with bracelets. I enjoy wrapping my mouth
around her ankle that has a bracelet around it.
This isn’t cool for the people who live in the carpet
either. But I am strong. I am in love
with a woman with an ankle and bracelet and
at the same time I eat and think
how the Greenland frost camel has destroyed my dream
of ever sleeping in a bed made of poems and torque.
Then there’d be no more drinking. Then
a sense would come of how arbitrary
are the undulations of the world. And like
the people in the carpet, it would be realized
that there is nothing between me and the bracelet
and that torque is a tensile term and there’s no way
a bed could be made from it.
I’m drinking and screwing paper to the wall,
it’s like I’m a sieve for things, all the things
that make a difference shooting right past me.
In this world I look at what I’m supposed to look at
without looking. There are many shades of green.
Everyone has a favorite green. It is everyone’s
secret and favorite color. Like an olive
that everyone loves. I once was an olive,
A Spanish olive, but my wife wasn’t Spanish she was Norwegian.
She didn’t like olives, she liked the russet capes
of radishes. She would gnaw the capes off them
so the ivory pulp of the radish lay naked and doomed.
Though I was an olive I wore a russet cape.
They mistook me for a radish that had rotted.
They did not take my cape from me. They left me alone.
What a pathetic radish, they said. My wife left me.
The Greenland frost camel walks around
with no conscience. Its hooves stomp upon the leftover
muck. And the snow, which twitches
like poisoned caterpillars which are dead
but still twitch because of some anti-matter
left in the throne room with twenty two batteries
stuck inside the throne.
If you ask me to fall I will kill you.
Just ask me. Go ahead.
Make me think there’s a point to all this
and I will show you the underside of the law.
It is thick and gutted and its tail is forked.
It is the tail of a camel
devoured by a tax form. It’s a form
without a form. It’s a sink that looks like a tub
where dead, mutilated guitarists awaken
to wash themselves.
The alligator was an alligator.
He made a lion out of paper
and ate it. He felt a lot better
because he was starting to develop a complex
and realized it.
There is too much violence.
There are no ways to handle anything for real.
I hate violence. I want to kill it.
I want to take it between my thumb
and grind it like one would grind
a bug that has almost died, or some chalk,
or a bad, vengeful driver.
Maybe I’m the devil.
The idea of strength got mated
to a possum-fish. I broke them up.
There has to be violence to fight violence I said.
You have to be strong to fight violence I said.
You have to kill it I said. Because of this
there will always be violence.
The scrap vehicles are filled with ogres.
Look at how they sweep whatever’s in their path.
Sweep, Sweep, they call, believing they are cute.