Compelling passages, notable quotables, bon mots, disjecta, ephemera, and miscellany.

The mind mad, its skull stripped

of flesh and indecision,

the voice reduced to banging bark

from jawbone hinged to the gutting maw,

the steam shovel, dry, vomits stone;

the howling engines wretch

and disgorge the innards of the earth

onto the staggering backs of trucks

as a butcher weighs clumps of viscera

on the platform of scales.

The machine grovels to eat the living rock

its own treads stand on,

passion deeper than the gutters of the street,

and sinks, stiff-necked and chin-deep,

into the sure, certain sewers

of its own self-righteous pit.

From Selected Poems & Prose Poems, by Kirby Congdon (Presa Press, 2005)