My Failed Poems
Adam Scheffler

So into the maze of the meatlocker comes this poem and cannot husband it. For none there, hornless, scalloped adrift will ring out from their scooped conchs, let alone spring back to life amidst the bluebells, their gossipy spittoons. And the part where bodies clunk down the mailshoots of Television while onions are peeled away to terror’s blue crystals is a set-up already auctioned away. So into the albino palace comes this new poem ok, right up to the throne, but mumbles awkwardly, eyes glued to the wall-paper whose roses curve like the mouths of shrimp-Lincolns. Drawn on there is also a funhouse where one more poem arrives and has a decent time with all those mirrors, but can’t remember it later in the poverty lines awaiting its appointed harmonica. Into the disaster the final poem cannot go but stands at its edge sipping tar and blinking at the dismayed faces of electrical outlets, pulling leaches from its arms to red welts which it tells others are love bites, it is such a sexy poem, and then up and away into the various heavens where it doesn’t make it past the heaven of insects, the one where a horned stag-beetle humps an infinite rotting banana as the stars turn.