Friday Poetry: Anthony Madrid

At Poetry Circle at Lawrence's on Sunday, Lawrence read this poem. I am into it.

Anthony Madrid
Of the Many Hymns to the Goddess Kali

Of the many hymns to the goddess Kali, only one is worthy of a poet's respect.
I mean the one wherein her ankles are hung with severed arms;—

I mean the one wherein her face is lit up with cruel pelasure, and she has a beard of sweat
As she has rear-entry intercourse with Vishnu.

The germ of the 580 couplets has passed through a fabulous network of tubes.
Strange, to think that mind and language can rise from a plate of meat!

My tutor lashed it into me, with a switch that had my name on it,
That every schoolboy is beside himself with envy for his teacher.

But better than "grisly revenge," or any other form of playing to the crowd,
Would have been to destroy the boy slowly and privately, by means of misapplied pleasure.

Whoever reads more than a dozen ghazals at a time will be overstimulated.
After a certain number of hits, one is simply wasting a precious drug.

You should have been a pretty girl, Madrid. The world might have been spared
All this body-resenting satire in the form of a parting shot.