Dave Shortt

The Parasites

intolerant masses of eastern
& western dogma forcing open
single cells vulnerable to heresy

something seems to be watching,
a congregation of squints
admitted down through the porous years,
ranging from bacteria to gasoline,
its distilled tar pit organic menageries

as varieties of eccentricity & quirk
arising from pure need,
they account for at least several species of love
& madness

would expectations of soon being purged
apocalyptically from the habitat
introduce accusations or treacherous elements
capable from the beginning (so far)
of finding something to eat?

or a marginalized liver
whose powers (grown frivolous) were easily outflanked
comes back to crowd oneself out
with its unpoliced populations of microscopic doubts
overthrowing bread & water

as renegade biochemistry mutates,
words fail & die incognito,
but heroic remedies imagined in pristine surroundings
were still able to lie their way through
those sleeping & bordello’d outposts of the blood

life cycles passed in earth’s lightless interiors,
filaments of a bioavailable dream of competition
incubate in cooperation in votive bogs

boundaries weaken to where muted gurgles of absorption
echo systemically in praise of nourishment,
Hippocrates exists unblurred by succubi
in resistance to ‘feeding the worms early’

if desires had been free of sugaring their yeasts,
satisfaction wouldn’t have been a victim,
while superlatives’ progress froze in the guts before
the least righteousness unbelievably wanting to enter

(& this is your experience:
the pockmarked physiognomy & straggly hair
of a creature that was floating
in the pincers of texts
while drugged antibodies jawed
with voracious paramecium crowds
being sent through)

withdrawal into simple (live) transactions, face to face
with the unblushing anima trailing
pools of vomited & sneezed mitochondria,
& raiments of flagella just shed

please refrain from hoping to gather insight,
expecting clairvoyance to be sucked like breast milk
from brainfog,
by a last surviving & all-purpose animal

specialties of bio-minutiae induce tremors
(boggling learning’s efflorescence)
which distract waves of raw garlic & walnut hulls
pouring in combat
over fatigue’s omniscient triviality

the ground where one stood & moved around on
could never be one’s own:
diversity’s cryptic morphogeny
distributes each bite of light
& swallow of darkness,
for the time when mistletoe
has to consider leaving oak alone
when it next launches out
into the Hosts