Writing Samples

Poetry by Jon Raasch


Donatello's Abiogenesis (Mighty Donatello)

Hyperborea's metropolis has curdled:
its walls are cold and unctuous.
Neon decalcomania reflects in potholes
that brim and chortle. 
A taxicab splashes a lout,
a solipsist who wanders the dark volatile
and hiccupping.  Oily pools of his spittle
collect and swirl in the city's numerous drains.
Among spiraling scaffolds and cranes, 
we seek the second turtle,
lover of machines, Donatello,
a plastic diamond in the filth that bellows.
 
Hyperborea's vermiculated, philo-
progentive populace is both fertile
and onanistic.  Philo-
gynists duck into bordellos
to cure a borborygmus;
craving ventrilo-
quouy they buy the caly-
pygian and ease their droughts.
If progress is solifluction, this is the grout,
the podzol, a yellowed
and yellowing terrain
as pale and parasitic as its murrain.
 
David clutches Michelangelo at the reins,
I gaze through our pelo-
rus at buildings eroded by acid rain
to their mere infrastructures: grainy,
rusted-metal bars forming a girdle,
its base leaks an alizarin stain;
remnant of the thriving, insatiable rain
that we want to mimic, to cleanse this xerophilous
landscape of the filthy orgulous
philistines that threaten her.  The reign
of Helios must end, we must rout
the philistines and force their leaders out.

One is a pink brain with a mouth
like a weird cerebration named Crang
who whines when he flouts
from the glass womb of an android, shouting:
"I've two tentacles attached to my cerebellum,
the rose-colored limbic knouts."
They are indeed sickly arms of trout
that coil around levers, oddly motile
and slurping, as tentacles
tend to do.  Leprous, full of gout,
Crang's breath is podagrous
tiptoeing across that velutinous
 
tongue, stowed in the Technodrome, a numinous
metallic sphere, underground, safe from fallout,
in perpetually fueled motion, carving anfractuous
tunnels with drills like xylophageous
insects.  We seek the fetid non-cephalic brain
because we are his Rhadamanthus;
Crang has commenced abiogenesis
research on plastic Donatello,
complete with thunder, lilipution
Egor, and the feruginous
windowpanes.  Among tesla coils begins the turtle's 
nystagmus, spliced with the skin of cattle, 

therianthropic, more Bebop than Rocksteady.  His moans, audile
throughout the catacombs as he strains his struthious,
stitched neck into myotonia.  Beams of light burst out
his big toes, xiphoid and cislunar, slicing the clouds into rain
from far beneath the surface of Hyperborea: mighty Donatello!

2004