Sneeze Ode

Dean Young

Here comes the sneeze with its end-of-the-world,
mobster-motor, a-gog cog.
You better not be holding nothing full,
better not got hurt ribs.
Rip right through your billet-doux, weed-whip
your honeysuckle before any bees get sip.
Unlike its wussy brother hiccups, its argument
is politics not music, neither poetical like the cough,
if there's blood it's on the wall
not crumpled in no hark-a-lark hankie.
Flu's coup but too like the wow of wooing,
there's nothing you can do, not the court
stenographer, not the pilot or his co-
so think about that next time you're landing in O'Hare.
Even the cathedral's got a crack in its lunette,
there's a demon in the lemon, semen
in the seaman and out out it's got to come.
Opposite of hum-drum, nowadays
it's the best gods can do for visitation,
no shower of gold coin but a cold draft,
no whole swan but a feather tickle to the nose
then kerBOOM your body's not your own,
its shrapnel in orbit for years and years
before burning up in the atmosphere.