SUCKLE
The milk of elephants is buttery.
Cat's milk causes insomnia;
the milk of dogs is sweet
and starving children in Haiti suck teats of strays,
this is preferable to dirt-cookies baked
on corrugated iron roofs of Port-au-Prince;
the cookies parch the mouth and have no nutritional value.
Some drops from a woman's breast into her beloved's
coffee or beer and he's enthralled for days
and nights, always wielding a hard-on;
this is preferable to the practice in the tropics
where shrews lace their stews with menstrual blood
in order to keep their men in a daze.
The milk of the jaguar,
when the animal is speared
and the liquid is served in gourds,
assists in night sorties and
renders the Yanomami invisible to foes.
The milk of the blue whale induces
instant narcolepsy; the drinker dreams
the depths, the silvery hair
of jellyfish and magnetizing gaze of the shark.
The milk of mammals is not produced by females only;
the male Dayak Fruit Bat lactates and nurses his young,
and among human males
there are cases of lactation following depression,
stress, financial insolvency,
and the adult male, middle aged,
wishes to suckle again, but mother is buried,
and so the male trickles his own milk,
yet the milk of man is bitter and
non-potable like the sea,
and its salinity leaves him raving.
DISTURBING THE PEACE: ALWAYS A CARNIVAL
In unpaved colonias of Mexicali, celebrants rent jukeboxes, karaoke neon, and beer
froths 'til five in the morning. Party-goers drive off in sudden lurches of buffalo-sized
tires, bottles and splutter of sparks, and roosters soon rile up a ruckus.
Mud-lot cinemas of Bangkok: mothers chatter and feed brown nipples to gurgling gums.
Men gamble and smoke from the back benches. On the screen an actress cries and
wanders avenues leading to discarded sets: cobblestones from Medieval Paris or rural
Colombia, Shangri La, snow-frosted plastic pines, russet buttes of Styrofoam.
A man hears up to 180 decibels without eardrums rupturing, while leaves' rustle during
the green and soporific stun of summer peaks at 10 decibels, more hushed than the 20
decibels of a whisper in the dark.
There are languages that best pitch delight, grief at decibels which would perturb
the average American. He'd cup his ears as village Turks ululate and clang pots during
an eclipse, or stolid peasants collapse, shrieking when Mother's coffin is lowered into
dark Antillean soil.
Like pneumatic drill, a rock festival zooms to 150 decibels, and that night when I was
sixteen, Pixies on the stage awash in blue tarantulas and scarlet star-sparkles,
teenage wave thrusting through electric heat, and I looked up, straight up, the argent
moon-fields, and further off, the bloodspot of Mars, Jupiter, imagined the boulders of
frozen ammonia, crags of jagged carbon-dioxide in Saturn's rings, crashing
against each other silently, rendered to smithereens in the vacuum where, had it have
been possible for those Monkeys in heaven to thunder a guitar solo cadenza, it would
have disturbed the cosmic, anoxic peace.
BOTTOMS UP
Sluggish honey, beer of Sumeria was tumid as the Tigris;
when priests drank their daily bowlfuls,
a populous of crocodiles, cranes and jackals sweated from their pores.
Dutch beer is bundles of wheat, long skies
overcast and wind wet with mercantile tidings.
All the nipples of 19th century Dublin
stuffed into eager gurgles of infants; the wet
nurses drank ale the color of River Liffey,
breasts pendant with sediment, rainfall.
The beer of Bolivia is pale and tepid,
best suited for plazas when twilight shakes its tail,
and sniffs out trees and bushes for a spot to sleep.
All the beers of the Rhine, all the tubas burping
slow waltzes for the fatherland, while women
and children daydream chocolate cake.
On our first date, my wife and I stopped at a bar
after a dinner of wonton soup and Peking duck,
and we shared the same Cucapá, lips
meeting with every swig, for a bottle of dark beer
is a parliament between lovers.
The beer of the Yucatán makes for long
moments peeing in alleys abuzz with winged beetles,
and a car door slams a few blocks away, and love,
heat and departure, all cocked and hinging on a click.
According to the denizens of Ur, beer eased
insomnia, impotence, gout, melancholy, arthritis, halitosis,
and scholars theorize that malted barley mixed
with roots, snake venom, and bile composed theriaca,
that panacea brewed for the Omyaad by Hasdai Ibn Shapprut.
The only people to brew no form of alcohol, saw their
bloodlines wither. But sit in a noonday patio,
finish a mug of beer, and another man dimmed in mist
toasts you, stirring your thirst. The road
is circular; the tavern is a threshold of fog...welcome in.
