Mark Cox
Ta Da
And so, the tour bus doors retract,
Presenting you
With the stone Aztec stairway
To a creepy roseate gravy
Of renewal and blood.
Below that dawn, it’s clear:
Our easements are conditional.
The body has no right of way.
You’ll have to wait your turn
Behind the tour group of feral dogs
And the shit-flecked toilet-swirl of
crows,
Never, as we are, limited to one
carrion bag apiece (the dead being
duty-free).
Then, here at last, the Montezuman
chalet
Of civic martyrdom and sanitation,
Braided vine rivulets of blood-letting,
The font of your cupped hands
Raised up, the sky’s wound coagulating
From peach to nuclear orange.
There may-could be a noble lineage
Of self-sacrifice, but the circle you
travel in
All have season passes for
The Yucatan white-water adventure,
then lunch at Planet Hollywood.
In the end, the unthinkable, the unholy,
The heartless, becomes no more
Than coring an apple, pitting a fig,
Scooping a heaping fingernail
of coke to each ruined nostril.
You know how those sun gods can be:
Utilities are never covered
And you do what you have to
To pay the rent.
Mark Cox teaches in the Department of Creative Writing at UNC-Wilmington
and in the Vermont College MFA Program. His latest books are
Natural Causes, (Pitt Poetry Series, 2004) and Thirty-seven
Years from the Stone (Pitt Poetry Series, 1998). |