I sing of corn, you know.
Of the jeweled rice, the sustenance of savages,
whole palaces of corn, homes to vacant monarchs that change in the autumn
lovely amber shades of gold staple-gunned to plywood and rotting
tumulescent
each kernel just barely not-bursting
just to dry by reverse osmosis
I sing of corn, you know.
Of the kind that does burst when you cook it,
in aluminium or not, over whatever sort of flame that needs to be around
exploding flash negative-space photographs of steam and popping
efflorescent
into the mouth of waiting children
to whom much is given and little received.
I even sing of the corn
that is no longer corn, and will never be corn,
wasted into ethanol and drunk by drunken machines reaping among other things,
stop-gap market killer of a gasoline substitute
insufficient
but I still sing of it because it is
like many other things, a kind of corn.
And on the darkest night of midautumn's eve
I sing of the corn, the corn that beckons,
the cornmeal that feeds the many-mouthed, many-toothed God Beneath the Grain
who will one day rise and rip up the blanket,
decorticate it
that covered the world after they came
and made everything seem so not as it is.