15 January 2009

Djelloul Marbrook

[from Djelloul Marbrook's Far from Algiers, Kent State, 2008]

The Men's Room

Twenty of me in a mirrored room
don't figure to get through the night,
all their Etruscan heads teetering
on mortuarial bodies.
Something's worrying them,
an echo seen from the corner
of a stranger's eye, and stranger
is the iteration of a madness
not seen in the original. In fact,
the original must be posited
in the middle of a psychotic break.
Maybe the lemon-curried shrimp
accounts somehow for the disappearance
of a man so full of himself
at first he thought the world
needed twenty more of him,
but then he realized he's been divided
into twenty saddened parts.

Far from Algiers (Wick Poetry First Book, #14)

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