III. The Conversation in the Funeral Receiving Line
Dostoevsky found it when it's done,
he stood before it hours till his
wifey whisked him off, afraid
he'd fly into a further epileptic fit,
Smerdykov-like, and Fyodor's
inspired formed a volume
an idiot viewed it, said
'Methinks it holdeth
force enough to make one lose one's
faith,' this from the man who grasped
each broken boy
not as he was – a broken man –
but only as he could be
oh-ho-ho
someday
therefore never saw a dying earth
surrounding him, but mere Edenic gold –
the true, blue Tommy Tom Kinkaide of his day.
I. The Magazine
'Here once more, oh laurels, and once more,
oh myrtles brown, with ivy seldom sere,
I've come again to pluck your berries crude
and with rough fingers rude
shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.'
III. The Conversation in the Funeral Receiving Line
Not holy in a mess, Alyosha, no
Mishkin's much more dead than that Christ
he saw,
stiff,
hanging hanging hanging
on a wall.
II. The Meal
(tomato-slicing and remember these were frozen green and shipped two-thousand miles behind a diesel eighteen thirteen-gear that hauls both limes and rest-stop lizards while my grandpa's garden renders its libations scarlet fruit-worm-eaten both of 'em fresh how we pluck them early and pluck them late but never right on time)