Marylebone's Wedding
By Duncan Hose
Pagans I don’t know what they do with them
Chuck em in the river I Spose
You try drawing the head of Xipe Totec he will take
All your drankeeness, guile and something else which you will not
Be getting back.
Cornkingdom! Feed us your husks..
I’m talking spectacles of excess like the Demolition Derby
Not for theory but for my little party at which
I’m sure you’ll come
withall the indignity of a collapsed bouffant
Or the pissed bride and groom sliding down the embankment
toward their departing pirogue
I wander as I must the botanical gardens as I must
It seems to us a colonial fetischery
Redeemable as a pharmacy- here
Are the juices of the sacred Maguey Plant
Succor to the schoolchildren who carve in its flesh
Details of their crushes
Where are those vegetative triffid gods the poppies
Who give us little opiate blumens in the blood
Where the delicious loblolly
Or those higglady pigglady plants that give us peach bonbons
The fabulous dollar note the terrible marshmallow
Where is their secret armoury
Their cabinets of technical biofilth?
There must be some campaign to keep the animals away
The aphid the sexy leech of heat the sacred maguey worm
Sort of an obscene reserve for plant-o-philes
I must follow its honkeytonk logic and make it familial to myself
Look, there’s a nice bit of Rodneybeard, a savvy but flakey Shirleybush
The Erniegrass is everyone’s favourite while the Bessiegrass is often intractabley brittle
The Sharynfern is very pretty, poisonous in youth and dying as soon as it reaches maturity
Having a certain charm of insolence
The Patricia Gum an obvious Matriarch even as a sapling
Kaye Doug Brucie Ken Marg Pat Gus Leigh Brett Shirl Wayne
They all turned into gang-gangs and pissed off
Back to Ulverstone
The magpies rouse in the supernaturally heated air
There is a strange Murphyness to it
The intricate folly I mean
You know they straightened the elbow of the river to build it
This anti-kink an original blasphemy