Rinse With Water to Remove
Chris Elliott
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The taste of pessimism
Germs that cause used car clerks
Pocket protector ink
Sticky hand shampoo
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One ungainly ugly dude
Greasy locks across tenderloin tundras
Blackhead holes no light escapes
Thick duffy drapes parted
Windows of soot
Where valentine buttock marks were drawn
And remarked much upon
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Forcibly from the judge’s chamber
The chamber pot, the chambermaid
The chambers of a gun: elements of a detective novel
On the shelves of detectives’ hovels
Where pipe smoking lives in bachelor unawareness
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Foul epigrams, soap residue
Residual payments, smutty-nose
Popcorn munching enthusiasts
Amused by abuse at its most abusingest
Purveyors of meat and other infractions
In fact I take back the meat of my groove
In fact I retract rinse with water to remove
Champagne in bathtubs, Roger
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These deep-hearted blues
Smack on our backs in the grass
It doesn’t matter what they mean
When they mean it’s for you
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Statues, the cashews you’re allergic to
The horse that sneezed you
Out its nose into hay
Buckets tipped over
It was not a nice day
Patrons blinkered by noon
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The brow of the Queen’s prow
Describe in detail what the sailors do now
The leaves are immaculate, filthy and new
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In due time subdivisions reunite, unify
In the lines between lines
The shape your shapes are in
The stage fright you manage
With g-strings and gin
Whatever the occasion
Be you Caucasian or Nubian
Back street or Brahmin
Pravda or Peruvian
German or germinating
In plant pots a-hangin’
From lecterns whose bulbs burn
From yesteryear, yore, long before yore
In the pre-yore yester yore before the before
When the first Cro-Magnon and the second mate
Of the waterfall slapped mud on their bums
And marveled how great and how small
The birds and the bees were, the bees and the beaver
Who built great walls in the bum of the river
The river, rinse with water to remove
Original sin and sinful good grooves
The grope and the grovel
The hand and the hound
One is the master
The other bows down
That’s the natural order of things
In this town of all towns
With the shit-stain pure mud clouds
The q-tips like x-rays of angel bones
Steamrollers, hair curlers, cigarette tubes
The fact still remains
You’re born to a boob
Unless you’re reptilian
in which case you may
Be trampled or tucked in a zoo cage one day
The clover sliced holes in the floor of our tent
Bicycle boys, spin. Turn around
Go back and run over the dead snake on the ground
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The blood ashamed Mary
Olive oil spilled
On the deck chair decked with the cherries
How long must we wait for the traffic to relent?
How long must I wait till you mean what I meant?
Freeze. Put it down
Back away slowly
The gun ain’t no plaything
And Sue ain’t no playmate
So don’t shoot nobody
Nobody gets hurt
Even when they do
They return in the desert in a shimmering heat
Sweat drops on your lips, which you can lick
With your tongue, or some else’s tongue for that matter
The slimmer your hope
Your chances get fatter
Nip from the bottle
Don’t slip down the tubes
When you’re lowdown and hateful
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Ain’t that the way
For those born to a boob
Brushing their teeth
With the nub of the tube
While the toothbrush floats down the river until
It washes up on a dam
Where a beaver wields it to kill
The corn farmer’s daughter
That dirty vile whore
The mean little beaver
With the devil goat horns
Stabbing and stabbing with gleeful desire
To murder a human
Crows on the wire
Lift in formation, in a row they fly
A single black stitch
To sew up the sky
Where angels at odd angles in flames tumble out
Clutching bagels and bricks of cream cheese
Turning to ash, which scatter in pig pens
Snorted up by the snouts
Burn says the beaver
Burn say the swine
Burns say the trees
With their branch broken spines
Burn say the firemen
Laughing with hoola hoops
Wrapped tight ‘round their hips
Fat from the chicken coops
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The sins of the world
Forty days it took me
But not you, little girl
You’ve only got five minutes
To wash the blood from your hands
Or else I’ll send you
To the cursed beaver dam
Where the monks burn themselves
To protest the war
And a block of cream cheese
Dropped in the dust
Gathers flies
Outside the bakery
Where the Pope arched his eyebrow
At the mud on his shoes
And said, “Bishop, fetch water