Friday, May 6, 2016

Mike Ferguson, The Spam Poems


Ho|ma|ge to the Eschatology of Spam, image by Daniel Y. Harris



Librarians

The eighty librarians are incomprehensible.
They draw diagrams of their glorious retrospectives,
their penultimate reversions. Like Cain, they are as

incomprehensible as a spade. Do we denunciate these
eighty librarians? They are as incomprehensible as
Prokofieff orchestrating Idiot with Spade.

Do we decipher from their being handicapped with canes
that it is an ampersand to something else?
It is important, but incomprehensible.


Aenid

This month’s built-in cliffhanger: a verbal punch
from a steamy stenographer incanting Adolf,
her drunken handyman. Once a lapdancer, Sue

incants her silly drunken Adolf!
through a loudspeaker, loudspeaking his slippage,
his handyman’s perverse Aenid

He is inelastic.
A jesting slippage? A gap. She loudly stenographs
Aenid!


Story of Bend

Endogenous bend -
primordial parabola - as farfetched as
a davit from which to hang and mull

on the juice of neurosis.
Bent to a moronic
juice, primordial,

the hub of its
farfetched parabola,
this rotund saga.


Bias

Imagine how diabolic oration flattens
a restoration of the larynges,
the authoritative cackle of bias. Transference

advises such autism of restoration,
flattens translation to a peep of
moon, ditto zeroed.

It’s a modern cyptanalysis of a gripe,
of self-bias:
translates to zero.


Congeniality

Say aloha to the legacy of a congenial
athlete who fondly whipped a councilwoman (a buffoon,
wrapped up as dapper as a man in China).

This congenial destiny. How to wrap up the anniversary
of such descent?
A graven image:

athlete on lithium – feed, toss, hit.
Congenially dapper?
It involves woe.


Bufflehead

Bufflehead the quarterback
with his prosthetic head,
godparent to a seltzer,

taxis on the runway of his own travail.
The brinkmanship of Bufflehead:
a tramway to his own shouting verdict of

fingertip domesticity; emulates
the sequel to his daydream,
his own clientele.



—Mike Ferguson