Legendary Creature

by Ray Succre

Hello monster, stamping and hooting, you,
stripped from shower and striped as barber’s pole;
gut drop here and red patch there, you,
demoniac, love; the great day’s bowl of fog
in a room; in an instant you exhale its kin—

Hello, hello, losing your hair before virgins,
hell and clippers, preening your nails beside the sink,
standing unpeeled, cherub-assed,
the light against the canister jammed in your armpits,
ice-blaze of youth gasifying to the sound of an uneven fan.

Your glasses balsamic, ears that know sprouts,
gasses and mortise and every scrubbed port—
for these yields you are granted the hideous servitude
of greatness, the wealth of thoughts like a balm,
your boiled over truth as a being semisolid in all ways,
an existence unverifiable but popularly accepted.

Clap in the mirror. Hello. Hop and clap and grease
your mind to the new instant.

It’s the going fire that has you. The going fire.


*Ray Succre's novels Tatterdemalion (2008) and Amphisbaena (2009), both through Cauliay, are widely available in print. Other Cruel Things (2009), an online collection of poetry, is available through Differentia Press.