THE BLUE MONK
At 3 o'clock in the morning,
the blue monk wakes up,
and lights a lamp
in the whitewashed stone box
of his cell.
the blue monk leans nearsightedly close
to the page of the incunabula
left open on the slope
of his book littered desk.
The blue monk makes owl eyes
at the miniscule scribbled
in the wide margin,
graffito of one of the book's
former lovers,
and he gives the page a little kiss,
sucking on an omega
like a bone for its marrow.
The blue monk licks the page
for he likes the taste of vellum
and begins to read.
The blue monk feeds his eyes
to the ants crawling off the page,
the heavy book held against his face
like a pillow, like the dreamed bosom
of a succubus. His Prussian nose
snorts up the musty pismire
like cocaine, as the long sentences pass
like an army crossing
the last bridge over the Rhine.
The blue monk takes the book
to bed with him, and falls asleep
in the middle of a sentence.
Nodland uber alles.
The blue monk has no need of flagellation;
the cat-o-nine-tails hangs unused
on the same nail as his crucifix;
a silken counterpane is not too smooth
to gnaw the naked mumble
of his dreaming body;
a goose down pillow is not too soft
to kindle the slurry
of indistinct syllables
drooling from his mouth
like smoldering goaf
to scorch his cheek.
He flays instead his tongue
with wine stored ten thousand years
or more in the catacombs
of his great and numerous family,
the fat harlequin tongue promised a taste
of amontillado,
while under the dark habit
a silver trowel is poised to slap brick
with wet mortar.
The blue monk begins to snore.
The shades of his ancestors
draw close and join in coyote chorus
as he gibbers like a midway geek,
his open mouth like a tosspenny target
for rube philistines. Slack jawed,
eyeless in Gaza, word shorn Samson
gobbles his one vowel,
the vowel not chiseled into the hieroglyphs,
the vowel left out of Torah by Moses,
the vowel the Queen of Sheba
brought on her lips to Solomon.
The blue monk exhales the warm vowel,
and it floats like a bubble
of mutagenic fire
over the unfluttered pages
of the book's saliva stained vellum.
The blue monk wakes up. Blinks.
Begins to read.
