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Blasphemy* You named those lies clustered in each rib cage. Attached to some circular truth, you glimpsed soldiers of fortune sweeping their footprints with branches of mistletoe. You showed them the corpse garden couldn't keep blooming, not forever-black bags of songs split open at sunrise. You copied down the earthworm's calligraphy, broke illusion's hymen, uncovered the scars smiling under Dutch silk, translated the hyena's soliloquy. You carbon-dated the skull paperweight on the commissioner's desk & filled in with charcoal these mental lapseswhen all the gone ones resurfaced as dancing rags in the wind, you named the beast upon the gallows tree, its sag-belly dragging the ground. You appraised the medieval rot taking hold of dirt floors, crawling up the cathedral's high rafters. Madness, you brought it home. >f Harold Rubin was tried for blasphemy on the basis ofhis artwork and exiled from South Africa. 66 N EON V ERN A C U L A R ...

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