Three Poems
by Rob McCarthy
My Argument with Ontology
Heavily it bulks: here, body, resuming
its troubled extension, suet spillage;
resuming, too, its rococo medley
of belly sounds, of voiced surds. Just so much
tissue and bellows and sluicing pump.
Comic, this flesh, the mind’s clogged, curdled vesture.
The soul’s fat-suit, and guess on whom the joke is,
vitals trumpeting their finalés, pong-
light haloing the flesh adventurer’s
penultimate disaster, the panting
road-kill ever rising from its puddle, still,
always, thumb out for one more ride.
The Cretan Truther
Aporiae line the Appian Way:
logical knots, stations of the double-cross.
Imagine a plantation
of rickety ratiocination;
a forest of crucifixions, from whose bars
and spars dingle-dangle Cretan liars
and excluded middles.
There’s no disaster can’t be turned into
piastres.
And, as some wise head has
somewhere said, never let a crisis
go to waste. Nothing there is
that can’t be, in the bleary twinkling
of an eye, disproven. Or proven
once again, if needs must be.
Memory is malleable.
Right and wrong? Nothing more than
the nether ends
of a locally locatable
wormhole;
a crease in time and space
where all your sins have been erased.
And I? Why, I
am with you always, dear brethren,
even unto the end,--
howsomever intensely
and with malice aforethought
you might have been wishing me
dead.
Scriblerus
Heart-sore with heart-ache. O our wee broken
hearts, our mimical, inimical
cardiac cases, unresolved
by the faults in our stars, by karma,
by inevitability, or by the
fury of retributive
injustice, the damned spot that keeps
leaving traces, no sooner wiped
clear than again will out, restored
like some indelible scribble
but word-perfect at Medusa’s Table,
marmoreal, each epitaph
having found its proper tone;
engraved each dead letter,
turning the whole of it,
all suddenly,
to stone.
BIO: Robert McCarthy is a writer living in New York City. His work has been published in Orbis, The Alchemy Spoon, IceFloe Press, The Storms, and others. Robert taught English Lit at Rutgers University, and has been Scientific Director at Medcape, a website facilitating the continuing education of physicians.