The Poetry of Mark Daniel Milbocker 
Mariana's Drench

When did grammar get so messy?
new slang sloppily slung against
the same old wall long abandoned
by anyone seriously striking the
sacred epistemological pinata 
with the lift of an ambitious elbow
right between butterballing eyes
loud crack of the fulcrum unmoving
releasing that strange redolence
that turns us all abuzz and bustling

always asking what plus two equals four
regardless of the pentagonal beating
of the too obviously nine of the
napier's bones knitting with syncopated
chatter solutions to our colloidal 
livelihood of fomenting the beer-battered
into philosophers of stone strangely 
chiseled so filth may pretend to hide

the differential surge of our receptors
shivering from the briskly entropic
turns fingers into handguns and 
tongues to dogwhistling if not
whistleblowing maws conducting rituals
to gather trauma into the tornadic 
to wipe clean the unslated slumbering
whose dreams prune their daylife into
sculpted daisies so vibrantly peddled

the crater of the schoolhouse yard
lies silently encrusted with moral trinitite
lining the young lungs long fallen
into neophytic decay reduced to grunts
of affirmation exchanged between the fairly tall
who sleepwalk in albs of amens and unshared
handshakes for sale and for prophecy's sake 
a nickel for a glance into the salivating slit
whose kaleidoscopic imaginings of supremacy
lick at our throbbing need to tell lies
while sipping coffee with a smile

ethereal beans from the blue mountaintop
roasted to perfection so you can sip
your daily crystals with cakey bread 
and bring the kingdom of god to earth
ever a dystopian wasteland of filthy mirth
wrought by the unseeing for the one
born albino blind and anointed with orpiment
bronzer constantly astuttering about
insisting on the ermine of his unveiled corpulence
and an unleashed appetite for losing leaving
such a wake that even stygian stillness churns
and floods the small archipelagoes of learning
whose old buildings may cease to linger and
erase the toll of lost luminaries resting
on the epistemic oceanic floor and looking up
through the cascade of disharmonic spheres.
■





©2025 Mark Daniel Milbocker  All rights reserved.