DANCE

Fielded deftly enough, the questions nevertheless lingered far
                                                                                                            past the speaker’s dance. The dance
itself was instance, instance invoking another instance, in this
                                                                                                   case cake. Everybody in the readable
room was on first-name basis, basis evoking another basis,
                                                                                                       groundwork always. I was there merely
in my capacity. When you invoke capacity, went one question,
                                                                                                            would you have us imagine a badgerer
of badgers bred into pure and mere potential. Future to me                                                                                              `                                                                                      implied a blur of little legs. Only other
blur the black of the lady with the leash, in print. There was
                                                                                                Immanuel and there was Iman and then
` there I was. Folded daftly enough, Karl Lagerfeld was
                                                                                                  pure sphincter. Eat the rich, they said. Never
how, never with adequate granularity to merit the name
                                                                                                 of how, unitalicized. Call the cake cake.
Where is the disagreement? And how should it bubble into
                                                                                                       salience if not in a white white fluke.

DOPE

Head fuzzy as a fiddle-
head, addled by molly-
coddling, I rouse myself

to lightness

like rabble-
rousers rouse rabble,
prod myself

into camaraderie

like cattle-
prods prod cattle,
face myself

in happen-
stance

like op
faces ed
print impossibly

close when the print daily
is closed, as yet undisclosed
at the door—

I mainline hate silence
through the filter of a tether.
Through the sleep of a beach
you chug love speech.
We are not the same
meme template. Yes & no. Tusk & helmet, hip
& gable, economic & political like avocado
and coconut, ibuprofen & inverted,
to name two handles, span & fin,
collectively spanning
what exactly—

∩.

Like weakly licit thought tacit

in a vat of milk in a temple, temple active

in a desert, vat slick with a ring

of rats, not black, not white, not dappled—only

lapping, over-

lapping, their quivering equilibrium rendering

the rim radiant,

what we would sing if we were

to sing—

Aditya Menon is from Kodaikanal. His work has appeared in Peripheries, Colorado Review, Fabrikzeitung and elsewhere.