Blip Magazine Archive

 blipmagazine.net

 

Home : Archive : Links

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).

Maintained by Blip Magazine Archive at www.blipmagazine.net

Copyright © 1995-2011
Opinions are those of the authors.