blue morning

It was a temperate blue morning

it seeped cautiously through the woodframed and putty-glazed windowpanes enjoying 

the glasss wobble and its impurities as it passed 

   

rubbing itself like a cat

the blue was a kind of magnified blue that warned the rest of the day to follow was 

going to be very hot   scorching   if you had something to do outside get it done early

a considerate blue morning

“ . . . he whose talk is of oxen will probably dream of oxen.” vexed him  

he relaxed the large wooden spoon against the pots lip  its nose tucked at the round and 

curve where the wall and bottom kissed

he was stirring his slow-melding porridge

                                                                     tinged with cinnamon and crumbles of dark 

brown sugar

                                                                                                              --   Oxen?   he 

muttered  he was being facetious

DeQuincey  Confessions of an Opium-Eater  he hadnt a better comparison between 

consciousness and dreaming than talk  and the dream of oxen   he couldnt remember 

the last time he saw one    a rare animal was afforded an oxs maturity or stature

                                                                                                                      if he played 

DeQuinceys game hed ride the Dumbo train       parlay the dance of Pink Elephants

a clawed-foot bathtub snarling and pacing in its four-walled enclosure        quieting

at a bathers approach

and when they had slid down into the hot pleasant-smelling sea-salted water    their 

relaxed nothing-can-touch-me-now supine pose                                        

                                                                               itd devour them   splashing blood     

and hunks of rented flesh  snapping bones  a skull broken like a walnut

DeQuincey was chided by Baudelaire  his Fleurs du mal hallucinatory  each a Romantic in

the vein and fascination of Americas Poe   so much that Baudelaire cried   reminiscent of Poe
“Be Drunk!  . . . It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, 

be continually drunk! On Wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.” 

                                                                                                                 Arthur Rimbaud

his derangement of the senses  “I say . . . be a visionary, make yourself a visionary. A Poet 

makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized 

disorganization of all the senses.”

he stirs again

                                                                                                                                   

the porridge

                                                                                                                   

he wants it wetter than most prefer

it slow-cooked  stirred

and wet                                                                                                           

                                                                      and stroking it with a long wooden spoon he

thinks of Baudelaires  “I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.” 

hashish and absinthe

 

oxen

bathtubs

“Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore.’”

the sensitive blue roused him

 

curled at the corners of his eyes like flies seeking fluid 

 

                                                                                          reminding him he had dozens of hummingbirds to feed and plants to water

                                                                                                  and the porridge  was 

ready

1356,  Day-Between-Two-Ts,  23  7. 14