Yes, the Reference is Intentional

I haven't thrown up anything lately, so here's a new poem... I think the special FX are pretty mediocre, but the acting is really actual... Hope you're all well...

Against These New Quiets

I am unclear
what distinguishes good slayer but
hooves galloping on jumbled cobblestones
behind your face begins: a city – pyrite,
neo-Gothic with its gabled roofs –
I found myself there well after the sun
had died, among an enclave of the damnedest
critters: hirsutes and brunettes; wearing slippers
and smoking jackets: I referred to them
as quiets, and what else? One of them by
himself made the most ample chandelier-
lit chamber claustrophobic as the Pit;
only a quiet holds such absorbent power,
and drones on and on in perfect self-esteem.

Surely they were famous, these new quiets,
to be so boring. Cogs perpetuated,
turning in the many-candled room,
and a quiet rose among the space, ahem,
and spoke her word like a burnt sacrifice.
I wished I’d worn sabots. Instead I clicked
like dice were tumbling in my throat and asked
the girl beside me, Who died? At this, her mask
of clerk skin rippled; she said nothing, then
replied, Be quiet: they’re poems. It seemed insane,
this diorama, and bawl, all of a piece
with the pyrite I adored. I couldn’t leave.
Still, slayer’s cavalry was nowhere near,
had disappeared alongside of the sun.

I asked the girl again. I asked the mace
clenched in her right fist and after wept.
The mistletoe above us wielded
little influence. I clicked away
and, clad in somber hues, said quiets sneered
like librarians. To the crows inside
night’s radar dish I fed my lowly moans
from the plush hall and interrupted again,
gasping: Still, volume takes place somewhere, right?
And the sun-kiln still churns somewhere, riot-loud
despite these quiets, voids and other nuisances?
The Chicagoan girl regarded the mistletoe.
Me: It has to, if only to kill with yellowing
the precious, pure idea on display

in every wedding chapel, every mind.
She said, You lost me there. I said, I find
the noise more real than its silent frame.
She whitened. She said yes. Then slayer came.