Charles Francis Knauber
JUBA
This is the lay piped to a metaphor–
A song of six bits, pocketful of fear
The crooked foetus in my blood should spend.
What wound will bear him with the fumbled mind
I give him: child with crossed sight, double sex?
Time has a way of playing ugly tricks:
A sexton's son is born with rope-burned hands,
Then clang and music from a churchtop ends.
I mean a child can sometimes break a dream
Until its parents never seem the same.
I cannot make good metaphor, nor rhyme
The marked sperm with its world that rents a slum.
Drum-bellied girls whose insides beat like life,
Or drag them till my simile is grief,
Walk like fat drawings on an obscene wall
That some abnormal boy did for a spell
Upon his sister. These are magic dames
Who cross their husbands with their chalky limbs.
I think them in iambics that sing doom.
What omen peeks out from each ringing bone:
A miracle musician, or a fry
With two gongs where his one-cent eyes should be?
Big ladies, those are troopers at your groin;
They play my trouble's music out of tune.
