Daniel Morris

Ouroboros, The Godfather of Punk, Remembers His Name
 
What brainbox broiled again means to me is out of orbit again.
Dome upside down.  Knuckle jam and something
Oleaginous and gray spritzed
Toxic or at the very least wince worthy.  Archaic
Seltzer dispenser censuring one of their own already thoroughly
Ambushed domains.  Whose harmed heads has Howard
Overthrown except Moe’s brethren’s bronzed brains?  Derelict
Shemp’s hairlick goosed and Little Joe’s armpits licked clean like marmalade. 
Curly’s cheeks all a lather back and forth like scuppered tankards.
Are we, too, expending into upended modernist machine emollients?
The Stooges wonder.  Can’t we be other than an average mind striving
To safeguard our humble arse from the mind’s compassionate corncob?
The mind.  How Iggy Ouroboros wishes it were all so different.
Sustaining and yet always stinking with desire
To align our minor mania with a larger mantic failure of the
Dictator of the State.  Free maintenance the only demand.
 
 
To the Missing Tenants
 
Settle down.  You were half-right about me.
I was indeed a priggish superman whose Daemon insisted
I stay away from gyms. But I believed in the body.  How it throws
Away hidden knowledge.  Nonplussed, did I listen?
I was, in a word, like a parable under treatment
For the major mistake of my life.  I interpreted long guts
As a sign we could live mindfully in the best of all possible worlds.
 
Neurosis, in other words, for the rest of my life.
 
That, anyway, was the diagnosis
They put me on as if it were a low salt
Diet.  Then people – like you? you? – seemed to be
Shouting something serious at me from the precise distance
I would mishear “earthquake” as “mere decline.”

As I (mis)understood, the missing tenants
Evaluated the effects of my malingering as a mere
Distraction from the small man’s grave
Over which we stumbled during parallel
Honeymoons.  In fact, we were making our way
During the Days of the Democracy to the Dream House
Where a crime would be committed about which
We could not design a coherent narrative unless
We chose to close our eyes to previous complaints
About our elevated condition.  Had we remembered
To download a story of a crime and a story of a solution? 
 
Back then, the wisdom knot had yet to magnify the garish voices,
Which confused my reflection with their own disappointing lives. 
In truth, their lives were the franchise re-boot
Lacking a sensitive interpretation of my backstory. 
So, to them, to the shouters, my life felt more like a prequel.
 
Sad to realize how far down the divided line we’d dived. 
And all because we no longer read detection
As a restorative act within current market logics. 
Especially for those of an alien covenant
Deaf to fan complaints about my mood board.