Happy

Soft happy thing
stolen from the wilderness bred and perfected
like an ideal strain, eugenics of happy softness
feels and thinks and moves and it is slave
to us and to our same desires only without
so much extraneousness.
Happy to be noticed to shit and not be beaten
to eat and not be attacked
secluded in a grove of artificiality
cut off from its Darwinian goal
too mortal
Is that what makes it Happy
or Beautiful?

Charcoal

Charcoal trap crushes dead matter, 
kindled bones and remains
raw black warmth and wetness, 
the charcoal crumbling like biscuits
tea-time traditions, oracles read leaves 
and stare in fires, a wet kettle boils, 
cook-cave shapes and cookie-cutter,
dead hairs and nails, bits of bone 
rubbed to shine like golf clubs.
Charcoal feast to ashen feast, 
wet gullets swallow and whimper.

Ringed larynx ridges, 
wedding bands to speech, 
constrict around undiamonds.
Shuffle it all with the poker, 
players, until he bleeds and 
vomits like 
an old train 
chugging charcoal.