Day 32: James Joyce's Liver (and other poems)...

James Joyce’s Liver

 

Stately plump sloped over like a limp beret fitted on an Irish cross

Bobbing up and down in the anemic rail of his anatomy

An errant buoy in the river liffey

Black as a pint of petrified Guinness

Friable, crumbling specks from a Martello tower

And for some reason

Wearing a derby cap and a set of oval spectacles

Blathering on about literary aesthetics

Much to the chagrin of the nearest

Bodily organs who can’t understand

A single word he is gesticulating in frilly

Prose with noticeable lack of punctuation

 

The liver that is a bad ass and doesn’t succumb

The liver that would be banned in the united states for obscenity

The liver that jips mass to watch Notre dame football on a Saturday afternoon

 

The liver that refused to bow and pray on his mother’s death bed

 

The liver that Prometheus’s eagle had a hard time

Stripping out the concave innards of his pock-riddled flesh

like a bookmark in the middle of Circe

 the scene where a prostitute swarmed Stephen

 

Is playing Thirds on the piano painfully

Pontificating how everything in life moves towards

one Great goal—in this case, possibly sclerosis therefore of

 

The liver Bono and Enya used to playing Frisbee golf

in the Southside labyrinth of Dublin

 Shouting out par every time they hit

 An officer from the Irish Republican Army 

 

The liver that is used as a thesis for students

who would never dare do that to their own liver

 

The liver that wouldn’t let you shake its hand

At a book signing

Because it just got done

Thinking about Gerty McDowell’s gall bladder

Claiming to have later written a book that is about everyman’s liver

 

The type of liver that is listed by critics as being the top liver of the past century

 

The type of liver that prefers to live in exile

 ineluctable and modal and painfully visible 

 

As it sits there meditating on a shelf

somewhere in a bucolic moss cloaked

quilt of snot green Consciousness

 

Stowed inside a moo cow cookie jar that looks more like an urn

next to the Gifford and Stanley Gilbert annotations

Waiting for an itinerant Jew

With a bar of soap and unfaithful wife

Who still has a lot of walking yet to do

To mistake it for a pork kidney

and devour it all in one single sitting

 

Breakfast.

 

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...Since the next couple o' days will feature poems mingled with narrative here's a few poetic sprinkles from a few years' back....





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also, my alcohol addiction had been completely supersesed by caffeine. Everyday, once a day, give yourself a present. Two cups of hot black coffee....