Pâté

Francis Edward Sparshott
From:   Home from the Air. 1997

The god holds me
between slack thighs,
short blue skirt
wrinkled around me,
crushes my head
against her breastplate,
feeds me fat morsels
of fact and theory,
stroking my stretched neck.

Down it all goes:
theses and articles,
faxes, printouts;
my swelling gland
pushes aside
a labouring heart.

The erudite heart
longs to regurgitate--
puke or perish--
but the god's fat hands
have me by the throat,
coaxing it down,
conclusion, conjecture,
rebuttals, reviews,
forcing my soul.

I am jealous of those
in whom strange alchemies
form golden eggs:
their rights, their royalties.

I almost envy
the fettered thief
whose guilty liver
fed his god's eagles
till they flew screaming
over burnt hills.

The hard red knees
of my god hold me.
She will cut me open.

A rich, pale mush,
sickly, delectable,
spills from the slit paunch.
Here is a sweet treat
for spotty students,
damming their blood.

I am in love with the feel
of divine fingers
fondling my feathers.
She feedeth me

beside the still cesspool.

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Francis Edward Sparshott's works copyright © to the author.