TOOTHBRUSH

My space-age toothbrush bobs in and out my skull

as though it were painting the Sistine Chapel
or the dark walls of Altamira or Lascaux.

Tiny geological eon-flakes fall away:

Many Leakeys come running: Richard and Mary
fondle my molars, incisors, bicuspids.

My toothbrush erases all I have said

today and everyday, through all my history
back to the days of William of the Cradle.

I erase the wicked and the good of my speech

until I am paid in full with Universe.

-1 + 1 = 0

There is no Heaven, no Hell.

I am trying to remove the painted image of the Sorceror

from the cleft in my upper palate.

He is so happy in the darkness of my mouth,

curled-up, half-moon of a man bent on his flute
which is almost touching his belly,
as he was in the Cave of Les Trois Freres.

On the veldt, I see the antelopes we stalked:

through my lips I see the lithe forms
(painted as if by Franz Marc
behind my sexy uvula).

The delicate sculptured antelope

chew with rubberized lips
yellow grasses leaning this way and that.

in winds which seem to come down from the Sun itself.

Plato appears too and makes shadows with his fingers

on the inside of my cheeks, the forms of creatures.

Plato fondles the bristles of my toothbrush sometimes,

as if these remind him of
the white hair of Socrates, whom he loved...

My toothbrush is a Sputnik of the jealousies.

Some country is jealous of my progress in “inner space.”

Who know what weapons I may discover inside?

War may be declared on my mouth, at any moment.

All the thinkers of the ages resent my ownership

of my toothbrush, my freedom to brush.

Marx and Jesus steal my neon toothbrush

and run away, with me hot on their heels.

Marx encourages me to “Embrace lumpen-dentition.”

(I push him into a ditch.)

Jesus says “Holy are the halitotics.”

(He goes down on top of Marx.)

My toothbrush is a bold statement of self-love.

It masturbates my mouth like poetry.

Eons hence, let them find my toothbrush’s

incorruptible plastic,
next to my scattered teeth,
in some technological Olduvai.

I was my own bigmouth to the mortal end.

No one knows the shit you had to swallow but you.

Brush your own teeth.