Valve Works
By Rob Sherman
Published by Philistine Press at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 Rob Sherman
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
Thank you for downloading this free ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to Smashwords.com to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.
The full version of this ebook, complete with illustrations by Sarah Ogilvie can be read online or downloaded as a PDF from www.philistinepress.com
Contents
Hypothalamus
Heart
Hallux
Lungs
Eyes
Liver
Hands
Stomach
Spleen
Kidney
Teeth
We are like chimpanzees struck by lightning, gazing in smoking wonder at our throbbing erections, struggling to hold the words we want in our recessed brains, but, in the end, just wanting to fuck something... to discharge the electricity.
Hypothalamus
The
part of the brain that controls hunger, thirst, and body temperature.
The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy
You may hang,
My Holy Greek,
In the amniote, like a stalactite breathing
An alloy of me, dripping it
Erotically
Down the Escher stairway
That my ribs make.
Your juice enters my heart,
Makes it a heaving, overclocked
engine
That loosely relates to that afternoon
I chased ducks and she
disapproved.
You may hang, a bud, a nipple,
A pear, a cave painting, a tongue.
You may hang however you please.
For I can feel you if I push
against
The beams of my mouth
My pilot, featureless as a knee,
Suspended like a sinner.
My crippled, Bacchal organiser
That stimulates my growth.
Hallux
The
first or innermost digit of the foot; The Great Toe.
The Random House Dictionary
In which the poet constructs a malediction against his own hallux, which, in the end, has caused him nothing but grief.
You grow in, you burrow, you mole
You Pinochet, you skunk, you troll,
You fat twin pig, gout-sponged, you spread
Take your real estate from the less fortunate.
You bloat, you block, you foul menstruate.
May an ill-advised Andean climb in poor health,
Make you peel and crisp and eat yourself.
May a spindled fish, with teeth and intent,
Rip you from your prehensile indent.
Even if I fall, great balancer, the equilibrium of birds,
I would tumble forth four hundred times to see you gone and burned.
Lungs
A
sack-like organ of respiration.
Stedman's Medical Dictionary
If I think of you at all, I think of you as kindly,
Insubstantial, clean and chambered,
A great treasury of exchange.
Your gold is hidden from all thieves
By the virtue of invisibility.
Eyes
The vertebrate organ of sight.
The American Heritage Science Dictionary
A scoop of rain black some ice cream in a drain black a bird a house a shovel that grits painfully
against the road black black black
The back of itself the encircling pink the light through the lid the hinged scaffolding and early to bed
This is what it sees but all through water, just water and skin water and skin to see where it's been
Liver
The bile-secreting organ of an animal.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language
A reworking of Shakespeare's sonnet No. XXXI.
TO. THE .ONLIE . BEGETTER . OF
THESE . INSVING . SONNETS.
MR. VEIN AND VAGUS NERVE, H. ALL .HAPPINESSE.
AND .THAT. ETERNITIE.
PROMISED.
BY.
OVR. EVER-LIVER. POET.
Your bosom is my noddled bed,
And underneath the skin,
My ear plugs into some godhead
And I begin to hear the din,
Of trapped hates and past loves
Bad beers and the nervous tread
As the wide orchards of the hepatic groves
Python-stretch them dead.
The plug-hole sponges closed again,
The flow's directed down,
They roost in piles like ordered hens
Amongst the crenellated brown.
Their images I loved, but your great comatic mole
Has synthesised their acids to a heaving, wasteful whole.
Hands
The terminal, prehensile part of the upper limb.
Random House Dictionary
People
never really touch, a static field surrounds them.
They settle
into it, like backs against the skein of tents.
But with a balloon's lens they are covered.
Cover me, O field, O
electric field!
And let me breathe free inside the nothing-bag of me.
Stomach
A sac-like enlargement of the alimentary canal.
Random House Dictionary
The greatest democracy curls beneath my lungs.
It greets the heavy politics of bread
And the haemorrhaged logic of satsuma
Equally and with aplomb.
The cardia opens like a crab's jaw
And the forum within bubbles and shifts
To the offbeat of burp and spew.
Debate is done amongst hydrogen
And then, at the Pyloric door
The terraces of dark, the country, the scent of glue.
Spleen
A ductless organ... serving... in the destruction of worn-out red blood cells.
Random House Dictionary
Eight months before I was born I felt you sicked up, I think,
From a genesis gut no longer than a fingernail,
A sleepy forge, an oven for destruction, the blood torch.
An old book calls you the organ of laughter
And I believe you giggle bile, that funny food, into me
So that I can chew and not choke, and the bones and spokes
Of the bicycles chicken skeletons make, the ribs of pigs.
Are broken in your Etna core, your magma that digests.
But most I see a line of bumping, clumsy blood, quaking and true.
Past their use, rejected and obtuse, marching to their death in you.
Kidney
A pair of bean-shaped organs... that secrete urine.
Random House Dictionary
A conversation.
I think you are the poorer brother, of us two.
I agree, brother.
You curl less like a Joey and more like a bean.
I agree, brother.
It was your fault that the incident happened, at that party,
years ago, when he was about to score.
I agree, brother.
Your cortex is patchy, like an old bug net.
You are right, brother.
I think they should take you; you'll feel at home, with
The pensioner heart, the veteran dick, the witchdoctor brain.
I will go, brother.
Teeth
The hard bodies... attached in a row to each jaw, serving the mastication of food and weapons of attack.
Random House Dictionary
You are a display case of flint tools and iron arrowheads,
A doddery, crooked, Easter Island of relics,
Some with use, sharp and the ship-wrecked splinters of dogs
Others, the cleverest, pushed to the back,
To grumble, shift, die and go black.
######
For more information about Rob Sherman and Philistine Press, please visit www.philistinepress.com
Visit Rob Sherman’s blog at http://bonfiredog.tumblr.com/