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**A Stranger Poem, After Shakespeare, With Reversals**
O open thou, **Art Book Two**, thou squared delight,
Sixteen soft leaves, eight by eight, moon-measured fair,
Where **Johnny Spykes** hath pressed the bruise of sight
And bound it fast with sound that gnaws the air.
A book that listens. A disc that looks again.
Their marriage hums. Their offspring limps in tune.
Yet enter now the hound, all gold and ache,
Whose tongue bears cuts like maps of bitten time,
Whose belly blooms with red, raw stars that quake
As if the skin itself learned grief in rhyme.
Some whisper *allergy*, some murmur *else*,
The learned hands divide, the answers flee;
For cat-born sickness slips its borrowed pelt
And walks the dog in false identity.
The kitchen altar changed: no chicken there.
Cast out the bird that once was daily grace.
Still spots did rise, like banners of despair,
Still doubt lay down and licked the wounded place.
Till blood spoke low, in numbers thin and shy:
“Thy B is gone. Thy marrow sings too small.”
Then Cobalequin came, no trumpet cry,
A humble drop—and yet it mended all.
O slow repair! O patience more than cure!
The welts withdrew, the crimson learned to fade;
The body, starved, remembered how to endure,
And immune fires found gentler ways to braid.
— — —
**BACKWARDS (read not aloud, but inward):**
*dehcuot saw ti ,niap eht nehw*
*noitacude ton ,erac saw ti*
*enoN saw tluaf eht ,enoN saw ecalp eht*
*ylno eht draeh ydob eht*
— — —
Say then the chorus, said by many mouths:
Full many dogs do bear the chicken’s sin;
What feeds one soul may rot another’s youth,
And love itself must sometimes starve to win.
Test thou the blood. Hear what the silence lacks.
Give strength where strength hath quietly withdrawn.
The cure is oft a listening, not attack,
A waiting out of night till itch is dawn.
But stranger still—
Within the book, a figure half-unmade
Licks ink from page as if it were a paw;
The CD skips, repeats, becomes afraid,
Obsessive loops like tongues that worry raw.
The art itself develops phantom rash,
Pigment flakes like skin beneath the frame;
Each image bears a tender, burning slash,
As if creation learned the body’s claim.
— — —
**BACKWARDS AGAIN (fragmented, misaligned):**
*emit saw tI*
*emit fo tuo sgnipparcs*
*ydob eht fo skrowtra eht*
*kcab gnillac niap*
— — —
O beautiful dog, thou argument in fur,
Thy suffering writes footnotes in our care;
Best luck be thine, till red remembers blur
And comfort grows more frequent than despair.
And thou, strange book, strange sound, continue on—
For art, like healing, stammers, turns, repeats,
Speaks sense, then nonsense, then is backwards drawn,
Till love reads all directions where it meets.
Pro printed book, numbered edition of 20