That Porcine fascist is a radio talk show host.
[LAUGHTER]
This poem, it's a poem about memory, I suppose.
But I realize, this is one of the few poems I've
written that seems to be, well, set in memory, but also,
set in Tucson a long while back.
It's called Screensaver, Pharaoh.
We had eaten the placenta in a soup
that someone based on a family recipe for menudo.
[LAUGHTER]
There was someone else.
It was Bill, I think.
Joked that it tasted just like chicken.
This year's model was brand new, and the needle
stuck on lipstick Vogue.
Costello snarling, not just another mouth, not
just another mouth, until Joe set the bong down
and flicked the tone arm forward from the scratch.
And anyway, by this time, Amy was shouting from the bedroom
that she'd finally gotten Star to sleep,
that the music should be Mozart or something.
I've forgotten the midwife's name,
but she sat sprawled on a patio chair.
The distant blink of Tucson down the mountainside.
She held an iced Corona and told us
she was too worn out to drive the snaking foothill two lanes
home.
Good dope, cheap champagne, a soup of afterbirth, everybody
but the midwife garrulous.
And now Papajeno was flapping birdman wings in his mating
dance around fair Papagena.
So the talk turned to duets, scholastic in the way
that stoner conversations go.
Whose placenta was it we slurped down
with cilantro and a dash of cumin, telling ourselves
the taste was not half bad?
Amy's or Star's?
And what about Derek, who now had moved to Mykonos,
leaving his storied seat behind?
What portion of the recipe was owed to him?
Now came the tricky part.
Where did the soul inhere?
The midwife rimmed her long neck with a lemon slice
and allowed that we'd ingested perfection.
The bodies all in one: liver, kidney, blood supply.
Its vascular estuary spidering from Delta
to sea, tasting not just of flesh
but of the corpus entire, which we all agreed
was pretty far out.
[LAUGHTER]
Lord, how I yearn sometimes for those days of sudden bedazzling
insight, however false and addled?
My eyes went Blakean.
And by the firelight, I watched the quaking dance of souls, bi-
and tri- and quadrificated and hovering among us
in a pea soup fog.
Lavishes dry ice aswirl from a spliff.
My soul, your soul, our soul, the oversoul
broadcasting its 100,000 watts of Motown
to the radio speakers of the whole Southwest.
Aretha's soul and Otis' soul and Sam Cook's soul and Numa
weighing 20 grams of blazing light.
But then the tone arm reached the Arias,
and the LP clicked off.
The room became sleeping bags and pillows.
Mexican blanket covering a ratty sofa.
The parts we didn't eat, we doubled bag
and carried to the dumpster, padlocked
to confound the coyotes.
The midwife took the couch and slept.
And by the firelight, the whole clan
slumbered, the cave wall throwing shadows.
This was 30 years ago where the business of the world
has taken us, I can't say.
I reboot.
The pixels gather themselves and pulse at me.
I could Google Amy, Google Star, Map Quest Speedway Boulevard,
and call up Derek's obit from the Sentinel.
But the screen instead coalesces to a tomb painting Pharaoh.
Lordly, he walks, preceded by his vassals
who bear his emblems and trophies
hoisted atop tall staffs.
Among them is Pharaoh's placenta preserved
and flapping like an ensign.
Race to the sky, the Crimson portal hovers in the wind.
From it, the God King fell headfirst into this world.
Kind of cornered the market on poems
about placenta [INAUDIBLE].
[LAUGHTER]
You only need one.