Fitzroy’s Moral Collapse
Steve Parker
alle kunst ist umsunst wenn der engel auf dem zundloch brunst
(all technology is in vain if the angel urinates on your musket)
—Austrian folk poem& lo it is stifled during that first marinading of the Congo
that a humongous Black Man encroached all in fur lurks
in the ochres for white women to promenade with parasols
in vapid trails of fortnum ectoplastic whereupon outwards
He wouldst rush to gripe their birdbones in transports
of shuddering & lissome delight with all social affatality
for such Christian swoons
whose vapours were uppermost
& inveigled & even & unto the lateness of the Ireland
such fettled behoof is to be crogled as those sauvages
squinting inholy trees of trinity affront the passages of
High English wimmin
upon whom to inrush
with many urges—eek now it is spake in sech North Americanas
where chestheaded men still lilt and loll in the frontwoods
of Vermouth and Moorish Caliphorn in long quackgrasses
as shy big birds parlaying wildly for the extrusion
of bonneted females
from their wagons belowwhence errant junglee wildness of this order saw also
Darwin observe in his fritter such a general finching
of life and aquatic erotortoise during his inchanting
of the galapageese as would give him cause to flutter
& take heart & in the mask of a vast bird as a vast bird
he would stoop into Fitzroy’s cabin there
to demand more pumpkins
be allocated to the dying damned lizards
on the foredeck—O how flew yet unevolved baleens
so wide so white and wide all spankers gaffs a-luffing—
where it is recorded that he would prefer to perform
his morning daunce of the galapagine finchfatherFitzroy’s reply is from scripture & to the effect that such
lézardice has now no place in the lives of crestien men
whose wives yet abide in their flossing bosoms of yeastertidethis in its askance
is his moral claps