The Gnats of Love 

	—a transcontemporation from Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil

Dracula, dentist-saint, knows Christ felt nothing for a severed nerve,
Hormone-spooned baby-food to soon-to-be second comings served.
Spasmodic Jesus-aim of the amputee's jejune gnats,
Cum-splattered axe, conjugated feces, a voluptuous shat.

Jesus the drug dealer: sun cut flat by straight Ajax,
No Novocain for the scorned heart, save the bad ass sax.
See the dumb-son's debonair sneer at the crack flame,
Hear Falwell reruns drowned in the clacks of a billiards game.

Imagine the magnificent loss of the bald porcupine,
The soul's effervescence from genuflecting and quick-lime.
God presides in the case between grace and bafflement,

Is not fond of the double entendre or the check-of-late-rent—

So will suffer the insouciant hombres of love:
Angels, dammed by gravity, lapping at halos of blood.

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Sampson Starkweather loves all his friends. His poems are recently published or forthcoming from: Lit; Absent; New York Quarterly; Redivder; Gargoyle and Lumina.