an omphalos for the lacrimal animal

the monument had been deliberately constructed

as a metaphor of the poem which contained it

and inside its bewildering walls the poem was displayed

in a series of pages or plaques

plagues which calmed the air

as pan an explosion and building the cool medium center

a fountain sustaining a column of water 1 kilometer high

which could be seen in the numerous galleries

their hull poems slanted their whole room stare cased

the monument was a stylized star crashed to ground

to found a wreckage of unearthly wholly logical beauty

to stand in the empty naos of poem and monument

and to gaze at last at this rising diagonal interior

the vertigo of the fallen towers frozen

and stair to stair go up the tip a tongue or balcony

and to gaze back down the form on its outside

to the roiling sphere where the bolt of water

must inevitably rise and sustain itself for some moment

fountain for day clock and night for the pilgrim

who takes to cocoon in ritual wrapped by acolyte

and loaded aboard the floating robotic balloon snakes

which pass through the halls of night

while the acolytes build the breakfast

great globular lattice scaffoldings covered in fruit

which the monkeys bring to the snaking tables

which follow the curvature of the earth

into the long and forking base rooms

cool and tiled revealing only prologues
and the warm round holes to the root tunnels
bell woe.
fishy phoenix.

or appendices or epigraphs

afterwards or indices

and the root halls are warm

but the galleries above less so
statuary poem
a coma statue
pink sleep meat storage

and only the plaques give warmth

their hot metallic surfaces radiant

the pilgirms are themselves the acolytes

the poem and the substance of the monument

contained within the fallen star

its pantheorhetorical curvafice

every inner surface may be

filled with the horror of vacuum

or the opposite narratives

pictures of punished libertines

or murderous statues

ghosts like tears

behind the laughing hands

of every translation

yorick now a froth of cubes

made of a glass veined with verism

that monkey sileni hiding in venus' tresses

a pagliacci whose courtesy describes

a mouchoir de nuages

a gas heart a bearded heart

a bizarre heart whose monument

poem or gaze begins

with a lens

set spinning within the invisible