A jeering mouth made of melted red iron laughs with a sound full of rattling nails, and a fist of gun-metal knuckles drives into it again and again. The speaker watches this strange, almost hallucinatory fight as if recalling a child’s nightmare, where body parts and metal fuse into something monstrous. Each blow makes the mouth bleed molten iron, but the harder the fist pounds, the more the mouth laughs back. The beating never silences it; it only feeds its defiance. There is no winner, just a cruel, pounding rhythm between violence and mockery. The mood is harsh and unsettling—part industrial, part dreamlike—as if the speaker is both horrified and hypnotized by pain that refuses to become defeat. The poem leaves you inside that unending clash, where laughter becomes a kind of armor and violence cannot get the last word.
Gargoyle — Summary
I SAW a mouth jeering. A smile of melted red iron ran over it. Its laugh was full of nails rattling. It was a child's dream of a mouth.
A fist hit the mouth : knuckles of gun-metal driven by an electric wrist and shoulder. It was a child's dream of an arm.
The fist hit the mouth over and over, again and again. The mouth bled melted iron, and laughed its laughter of nails rattling.
And I saw the more the fist pounded the more the mouth laughed. The fist is pounding and pounding, and the mouth answering.