From: James Fleming

Dandelion [Rustic Oracle] [You are losing time] [Coquetry]; Mealy Sage [Domestic Virtue]; Chinese Mallow [Mildness]

am a snake to the queen

dense blue coated, calyx-toothed

with slim-gleam silver tongue

for forgetting.

sunbeams are for kissing

she set in me a black ball of thread

gilt in kisses then.

so strange there the men

collecting content over form

yet dancers slither always through

and past the surfeit of space.

the stage more a medieval pattern poem

with edges frayed as dead and fallen leaves

that embroider this nest or burrow.

bouquets know that content is for liars,

if dewy morn then rid thine dewy fronds,

plied from alastor arms or smashed to bits on grided poems–

nevertheless never fearing the condemned cell

that is the living and the past.

am the mealycup

with eyes for eating light

with many pleated hands for to immure the keening in

keeping close this pile of blooms and clustered doe

engulfed in in-betweening.

am the mallow

oozing color really

flattered from form into folds of lichen:

a door, a bird, a molting braid

with devil’s milk-pail plumage

plucked and swallowed

loves me yet loves me not.

snakes oscillating in the sober bosom of earthlight

illapsing now through byzantine gray, cowper green,

and twinkling sturnidae plated on beds of twig and moss

there the nests of ambrosial oracles

for to eat to sleep to kiss to bleed

so they softly speak–