1

Wake Up, Copernicus!

by Jim Kleftis

Summer

3 Nietzsches School Days Incompressible flow in pressure driven pipe, that is Pissing his pants, the boy with seemingly every spirit From thought to experience (thankfulness in hell), manages to style a positive wet sense in his limbs and nostrils, that is, he accepts.

4 e-somnia instantly uploading mornings single color scheme texts of ink and frame stain a white bed sheet white page of the new york times escape section decked out in deco shock to the prism of the eyes breakfasts egg white birth blanc another sip from the sterile mirth of tell all vision screens streaking scenes of glass cleaner detergent and dishwashing fluid in ennui spaces of the least nutritious hours, early wonder white, wonder why woke disconnected from wake alarmed instead of light

5 Grade School Yearbook Photo a smile marked by terror, quivering static effectuation, subdued eyes anticipating a sun-bulb scorching the backdrop of queasy vortex shades, crimping swirls of disgorged color, sudden-spewed, blink-scarring sears freezing in light the scathing visions of polished grindstones, ashen-slabbed adolescence, smoldering fluid trappings of fear wet with continuum knowledge, sacraments from towering, enshrined lenses and push-button rites of passage that flare red-eyed possibility at instantaneous sensitive reflexes. the film of existence shutters, flashes blank and obscure apprehension, captured contemplations of the frames ahead, nearly near new world stare off kilter off center

drawn towards distracting little birdies, faces collecting in distance their summer-emptied heads instead of hot-blooded optics kicking back at the lens. seen are the seeing seeking forgivenesses of youths dont-blame-me phases leading to yearly ruminations through the pages of receptor portraits dazedly glancing, slightly deaf.

6 Scattered Corn O, let me teach you how to knit again This scatter'd corn into one mutual sheaf, These broken limbs again into one body; Spitting wisdom kernels at chuckling larks, They fly, but corn sparks. Algernon stutters, stumped and stumbling lisps, husks of drool Went to the junction to meet you al but we were falling in two. Conjunct these pieces into the resemblance of resolution, Speak to transform this liquid into form, fields of corn, husks of drool. Everything you believe in is meaningless by June. If memory isnt cooked, its raw; mortality is mischief. Cry and be merry. Fall while you may. Nostalgia is a dud Firecracker than never illuminates youth to its climax. O child, summers outcast, minds are miles! Form in the divide, thy language; Erase the sun from yer bible. The broken speech overcomes these acres, coming of age, And finds solace in the chaff it is left with. Hey Al, pocket blows to the gut as credit If you build it, theyll dread it, Like husks of drool.

7 The Clockmaker and deist notches Key rings cycle through a former order when leads become lasts and flat tire dreams plunge off warped piers into white port rivers, dreadful paddles for surfaces floating on disassociated adjectives and nouns. Dynamite or indemnity in scrub or skill hands, respectively, Fortune Cookie sentiments, the sunny connoisseurs of pawnship (like this) are terribly highfalutin. My dinner with Andre taught me to speak in anecdotes with a wit for devotion. Night owls relish complaints and overpriced doughnuts and donnas, contrivances, romantic comedy misunderstandings, incest, applause, anachronisms. (Judge: Tsk Tsk, mere nonsense colligation.) Windchimes, packets of soy sauce, those awning overhangs of hangovers, these yawnings with life, the sinister twinkling and aimless stabbing sounds from dangling bells in the breeze, key rings are both the tools of temporaries and the heirlooms where power sustains what is ours. Yet, keys represent to those without a chaos, a travel limit, the lack of locks worth keeping; A manner of speaking tastes the exhausts of engines, and soy sauce, and nibbled left over crumbs from the window sills of grand hotels that no one bothers to see demolished. Rumbling, crimes in Chinatown, the seedy reds of urban crowds corrupted for many a city disparager, like Wordsworth, who on revisiting pastures from a crustic, coal shot room there, called hope a noodle, the reality, a chinese restaurant, the alien, the superseder of doom. Things form apart, among the backdrop of dumpters, sinister hues, fears isolated cues hinting that puppet-stringed lo mein binds them to some tangled translation, the dragon behind the curtains of motel dungeons. Wordsworth contemplates suicide at an open window in neon vigil and flowered grave of generic Chinese take-out boxes.

8 At night, Howard Hughes is poorer than sight. Illusions for a foreign land, a general forgrantedness of ordinary is every Chinatowns decrepitude. Does every Chinese box unfold to the same blueprint of doom? Clichs, crux of abstracts, gestures as clues, are the keyhole emptying a room of its secrets. A decrepit, oriental lady with a surgical mask at the kicked up curbside of bus stops is lost to side effects; Psuedo-nomads ask the time from a watchband with no wrist: Doubters, star-inquiring of God. Dragons parade to fabricate the dreams of kites. The street, in mystery, seethes about what it rots. Chopin never played chopsticks in an opium den. The stomach is as passionate as the meals of its immigrants. Bullets click like rickshaws in the moonlight. Piano duets and red crowds ardor thee with energies, lanterns, burnt out, yet reliable rhythms, folds of culture cry meaning in obvious symbols. Images constantly build, understanding is never lost only shifted, expressed on trains that whimper at the burden of box cars, the dim station, bruises and sores of people cankering into the other; Chan is missing, but its the detective in trouble. Businessmen strive and fail, drink by starlight, jack repeats his past trades, clutches and imprints the oil of his fingers on incestuous temples, decrying the waste of America. Save the tiger, kill the mayor. Blood under the influence assimilates with the dragon, builds from lingual and ancestral dynamics the lost Orient, the majestic Africa, the allure of Arabia, resurrects emperors buried in their tombs of vanity. These windchimes, nodules of cold chicken, soy sauce packets are crass flickers, mustard is the muse to find a poet in. These fried epiphanies, plattered spirits have no chopsticks partner, no piano bench for offering sacrifices, no way to break from the pull of the noodle strings. Nods, tugs from magnificent confirmations do not translate to the page, yet separate, hinting moments at knotted compatibility, punctured and whirlpooling down total object and perspective, witness the destruction of fragments

9 to owl eyes, whole saucers, the sanctity of elder atoms. It is the duty of the devil to show the good in everything, that of the dragon to give the air wings. The keys, the command of envy, and Chinatown, serve purpose, repentance for restless fortunes, paraphrased on prophetic stamps, associations, the pudding of piles of photographs, succotash, impulses for anastomosis saturated and corrupt interruptions, midstream of consciousness identity-less-ness-less, perspective, scrolled persons, grinding and outplaying con artists, sinking by deflating lifesavers. This diamonds murkiness is clear to see. Juggling liquor and gait, alliteration is acclimatization to zip and the masquerader of the mask that forms to the wearers face. The themes, un-iterated; The narrator of danny boy truly presumptuous. Soy sauce and cold chicken is as sweet as the night hours aloofness that might teach these streets, hobbled and vomited upon, of snuffed nightclubs and faux family restaurants, to hold to these sorrows of wasted alien transparency as a mother. The door is locked, try another.

10 A Billboard Reads Kids dont hide from firefighters. Their summiting shoulders, slanting, featureless masks, Their bearish paws do not make them monsters. They save with a shepherds axe. There is a hydrant where the heart is, Christs pall upon the cheek, the ashen kiss upon the nozzle beak of a smoke-swooned phoenix toddling up ladders to pull through the burnt down palaces of the meek your blanket covers. Heroes dreaming of you.

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an American night and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of nations and suppose happens while there is still time coming down again leaning on the everlasting arms of a rocking chair a drunkard sitting porch who cannot drink from a water nozzle without drawing a flood to his front yard. who will save from the drunk drowning? To tell in you, as and was dreaming, The same things to pray for Break hearts in the army. Man in comedy determines the destination of His street. Train tracks becomes hurdles For the kid to cross. Of homely things, Fishing poles, records, dollars and cents, Collect in the stops of the widows telegram. Leaving for action, last of all, the end For a meaning. Hold together and dont believe The myths. Family sticks. Lay him down in the parlor with Ulysses, With John Wesley Harding, with his brothers, And wrap my coat around him neath the kissing tree. The Sunday after Easter in the old country Is a ripe apricot for stealing Away with a sweetheart in the rain To bring the war home again.

12

Autumn
for deerhunters

13 Whos Dead Its hard on everybody. Goodbye, Children. Dusk; University; Games end: Cataclysm. Incandescence. Football. Brittle gothic bird call.

14 Things Unsaid (by Necrology) Towards me, anachronously, since cars speed, Walking, with ever-increasing panicking Recollections through the ears jacked in output, Forearms to brow, hesitant Workings of a smile, a shield. Do not fret (an echo of uncertainty decays us). Stepping up to each other as once We were frienno, more than that Young and hewn from the same-suffering limb, Fell leaves further between our adumbrate distance, A road is lost, its throbbing pilgrimage reminisces, Returns only intangible processions of haunted cenotaphs; The sun retrospects sadly and the light is unbearable.

How are things? Not too much?

notmuch Nonot too much.

I hear us, yet he asks how school is. I, he, await(s) for/at bus stopswhat?(he another). There will be crude grievances exchanged, no shaking of hands: What uttered chains can be proclaimed dissolved By the now free and solemner Us? Its late. Worthless, keeping light this spontaneous Stereo, inured is the universe down with futile anecdotes, Maybe reactionary, mostly artless cussing On whatever, guy talk, bullshit, diminishing diminishing, As soon, fade outdelinquent collisioning accounting For years in discordance, attempting to climb from beneath The rubble of a land-grant amidst constant (de)construction, Explanation, as traffic, almost cinematically outlouds possibilities Of concurrence; Cracks in the Woodruff Avenue sidewalk Open and swallow Socrates and Ion. Regrets: never see himshoulda shook hands. These roads and these leaves and these dusks historically fleeting Tropes. And we grieve: Why couldnt I look him in the eyes Except in greeting?

15 Hades Last sandal flipping its flop, leg shaved for the summer, Donnes transubstiation bug; Gas in a coffin. Toddling sun, the supreme nose, flaring its sails, inhaled. A sphincter plugged up (no windows open, drill a hole), with icaruss wrecked wax, funneled from the oils of Bruegel sea, Adriatic funeral procession, ploughing the carrion seeds in sewing rows, troy-ithica carriage pulled by Socratic passion steeds, a kneeshaking ride, a claustrophobic Fahrenheit, Stifling, preserves the guts; Sugarrotting fruit skins in a plastic bag. Curry. Curses. Tobacco-sweet-reeking-lingering cloth, body aromas. A stuck greek isle amidst a barbaric odor-ocean. dizzynspiring hearse bloom strips down, gentleman only, wades out, towards bald hea(ded)ven Olympus draws into his arms the limp, drowned body of his boyhood. Re-opening a book, the her son was the substance section, peach insect crawls the text, searching his phallic antennae Across the Latin, DOMINE, understanding more than I. Holiness amidst the pollution and combustion, cranking industry and the splint on dawn fingers, the grasses untamed inviting by blonde weeds the scent of brown breeze, of fertilizer and limousine carraige and hot rubber and smoldering concrete, hypnotizing, clanging of metal sent-sharp vibrating junk round trip up the jaw and down the spike with firm iron thighs, this what hollow and multi-wheeled awaits and burns and showers as red light yet how a sudden quit engages, surprise at the command of preparation. Gravity forces. Bass thumping, headstone, sound alone, the lure of the Gutter. The focus to which direct the green eye and the blue blood seeks, found me speeding across bridges, collapsing in and in pointed walking sticks with rhythmic precision lashing, the mashing pumping chords, honks honking rumors hawked for news of the roads accident. Lines faded. Perspiration is a poem the day writes in fluid. Bloom, if you will, a driving agent, an operator of fate. A roadway to fortune. The afternoon bus is inconceivable to the afternoon. Somebody died there, doors crush the last words from em. Bloom waits for the concussion to calm him, asks the river the price of fare and pays.

16 and this is my body splattered black on city outcrops, untamed grass and patches on potholes, seemingly incongruent roads and walks constructed, nausea for nausea, winding to particular nowheres, sunk stairwells, violation zones, cemeteries without borders. Infrastructure at cost or a martyr? baked asphalt, lingering smelter fumes, an oily towel, a plastic grocery bag in the wind, ubiquitous brown bag; Flames of Frankenstein's arsonist, Liberty, raised from the ashes of burden, has a burden of its own, knows a cold unlike any other cold. Holed-sole steps, less and heirless, streets are a string of plastic beads being pitched on gameday. Suffering older than sympathy, merchants of pity measue each coins weight and social contract; charity canned. Clink. Transference of guilt and good Riddance. The witch drowns and is innocent.

17 Why Philosophy Why Now Why philosophy so Socrates be It virtue or beauty could he Not steer lifes techne to truth Abuse is a one way street No one reduces speed on Down a split head up the high way His call for movement Was honking in a traffic jam Shouting questions with no answers

18 Student, sleeping babe, an umbilical-cord away from me, On the bus home, strange acquaintance, no name, just a face put to a stop, University city, unreal cemetery, where he got off, Where wash ups are dumped off, where waffles soggy, where I ride on. Groggy, he naps through oblivion, dreams in his traveling, A sleep past the city, while how I racked To inform him that he missed a beat, Passed the aorta, or rather it passed usWho was this stranger to tell him where to get off? Perhaps the stops start anew? Perhaps the days are different? No, I let fate spin its terrible wheels when a whistle would stop it. Forward; bus charges. Deeper, he fars from Home. O Orphan slumberer, I doubt when a lambs kiss would do. Wake up! Our destination flees us, your dream defers! Request infinity conclude! For ends sake! Wake so I might rest! He wakes, late, soon enough, head swiveling, eyes pitifully full With the wide-eyed compromise of a broken promise. He stands, to the driver whispers his own last rites Over an engine bustle, the bus will now: stop. Doors open. The driver points back to where sleepys renounced lineage Droops in memorys syrup, where the buck stopped. Now beneath the cross Of the Riverside Hospital, a few football fields Of dangerous intersection to cross, no sidewalks, yawning feet Must leave their chariot for the mud above the grave of union cemetery, As I sit, more cursed than he, omniscient, with the guilt of a sinner And no God to know it. Yet, know this, dreaming naif, that as I blaspheme, I pray You got home safe. [title purposely left blank]

19 lords hall the pen cannot rewrite this demolition, convert this sentiment to its temple, the underbelly of a skeleton, tradition is decrepit and must be gutted. construction is more than structure, its language, Omens that signify go away like a deep dirty puddle in front of a doorway keep outs no parkings read off sides of walls, fences, stall the student of entrance. lords hall must fall to a renovation, the union must be torn from its foundation. History isnt taught, its born in words, in form of tomb and ruin that the poet occupies to record the faults the vaults show in him. But with his ink dust, his parchment is rubble, his voice is given to a power shovel.

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Winter

21 Exile on High Street I threw it all away on a new morning, streets Where I am passenger I am unsure of where to go. Uncertainty I cling to as an answer as a stranger speaks as if he is known, Sincerely, what cannot be false; To Believe, This phantom glass, yet an attraction, care I give To receive, to seek in others what is lost in me.

22 extrapolations Suddenly is green, color in merestone, Piercing, abstract, transcendent vocabularies Now crisp consequence, sublime Defined, embodied whites, stark statue gardens, Consoling hues, alien ridges, geologic grooves, symmetrical depths Winter mercy stoked in a late morning hearth, a higher jewelers Refined deliverance, not searching, there. Enterprising weapons Of grace, most assuring deeps, a cool-cutting rhyme, Sincere and congenial sharing in gift wrapping of warm guile; Shekhinah upon the standard shook up. She opened a door, yet more! Judgment stumped there for Infinitys headlit antlers, salt pillared male, fixedly Grumpy towards Scheherazade riches And new breath, and godliness, mute for reason, Superprudence of manners, rude in ruddy, for only silence Can equal eternity, antiquated blushing upon his stone face sinks a fleet of ships, The envy of Helen, the humility of Muses, met with stuck lips An ideal of Abram/Isaac/Jacob? Testaments woman of the well, Firmament set with overwhelmingly essential planets, Adamantine in outpouring palms whorled towards that luster expatiating style, Exchanging intangibles, of empathy. How unassuming, how careless Of thee to hail Ra, to escape analogy, to slay metaphor, Ye monstrous gates of Ishtar. Things fit together. Medusa astonies with recognition, O flooded engines Of a fainter heaven, coy visions of evasive response. Speak up shy purposefulness! Bring turqoised truth pebbles To all! Not exclusive to these coiled leviathans Swimming in opulent baths that strike terrific The unwitting male angst, the lazy complacency of time; Bless modern apprehensions with strict dial! No concept of beauty, no line this sight mimes For every encounter of thy eyes, Eves Facsimile, is a bannered, corporeal rhyme!

23 underdeveloped picking up dog shit with my hand in a bag realizes the disconnect between every animal interaction through not suffering but the gradualness of the decline, the underdevelopment of a child answering the question what do you want to be? among the bare-ass land stripped for new condominiums, through the narrows of leftover green, seceded to the domestic beasts between the fences of androgynous homes, the body rends and relieves its consumed hours, relives its consummated aches. unblinded windows, nosy with civility, empty, a reminder: that we are alone. somewhere there must grieve, in renovated lodges of disbanded fraternal organizations, in a key makers shop, huddled round the graves of the original bluesmen, a meeting of James Wright Admirers in imperfect circles of gray tangled halos reciting from memory in clear though shaky diction the lines that weather their own disillusioned dogs through autumnal cold, tramping chain-and-leashed. to bleed of fall colors: prostrate, polyps, Gastrology, tumors, red meat, recipe of the past seventy or so navigations, trashed in sickly season of thrashed forgetmedefecations, wrinkles (ragged antiques in ageless futures) sensitivity; the storytellers of biology (biography); my scars are my own. away, prodding his slobber muzzle into the soiled territory of his fleeing domain, the damn dog pisses time. natures circumlocution its infertility abuses in every delayed spring, puddling before me like a laymans table set poor and abstractly for the purge, the good earth. the dog chews a bone like a meatless poem where every line on youth tastes old.

24 Rough Night Rocking to sleep in a cursed rhythm, iambic motions, lean down soft left then thrust right strong to side a bedridden pendulum, drownded, swaying in sheets downwillcome leaves, long lines of cradling meter, l.o. low tide z axis brain washing gainst wall of skull, lullaby violently muses sooth in flesh form fluff, physically lulls the body to erode itself down into respite, spite runs itself out of its waking power, hours, sometimes wave-rhymes, spent all the adrenaline of the adolescent expenditures to drain, ocean dry, a spineful of baseball gloves, hair of hayburner, summer swell, wink or swim, orbit of ink star-twink, pillowy. Oh, cussing the Delaware on a twin mattress, body-boat thrashing against eye-ice the general of dreams navigating quilted the sky, his lunarsurf cranium on helms of night exhaust blankets out, rolls into constellation knots.

25 This is not my Vermont winter This snow is rocked rather than minted, Gravel is shoveled and the children Throw frozen lock nuts at men made of asphalt; The moon is the salt refuse of icy sidewalks And the sun is the marking of a dog's relief, Aluminum doors are nailed with copper wreaths And behind barred windows steel reinforced Christmas trees sting with one solitary blinking light. This is not my Vermont winter Where widows scatter roasted chestnuts over graves, Veiled in birch leaves, perfumed with holly. Spiked eggnog has not replaced The bile of my guts. I have no taste For cinnamon. There are no neighborhoods for neighbors To give gifts without giving up. If astronomy was an advent calendar, If carols were principals, if almonds were the size Of walnuts, then, in Vermont, where there is no howl of city, nor train, Nor summer to get lost in, would I freeze! For the cold keeps, winter clothes seam, Windmills spin without wind, as in a dream.

26 Honeydew for Hopkins Green is fire if the sky be heaven, clouds be soil and tree tops Would tickle our crowns, moon be a tomb, feather be a sad flower, and an airy morn will bringthe sky is dead, the crown cracked. Red is fire and blue cold root to a corpse bed, upper clouds expel their bearing pressure upon upcreeping earth and what girth must a mudbound human bear, wrath at the head, feet foiled birth, eye socket bloom and bone dust in the teeth of Pegasus, alas! There never was a garden that didnt have death in it. In a bite of honeydew, what forgotten king soggies, what emperor drivels down chins? Fruit be a funeral to him, that may, without seed, green we sleep, and pass the rot off to a wayward son as not. Think in your next slice of honeydew of the man smiling back at you. It may be a sovereign ruler, king, or the last meal of a pauper, starving.

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Spring

28 Produce The last stop, ol Uncle, the drinks and the times- at a funeral. A wastebasket filled with paper cups emptied of coffee, a marker of a passage of a time, the cups and the basket, liquid and solid, filling and emptying. Walking into the parlor, there is a history here already, people have already sat down from hours of standing, tales and jokes told retold and he was a nice man, events have taken place that no more and he was a kind man, transferred to the heavenly kingdom and dead so not dead and see ya later, the priest with his warm hands wringing heartfelt sap says I love you and will tell you not in judgment not in sickness but in life again: Man has roots. Man knows what to believe in, and why. Yet the stomach will not realize a fulfillment of a life, it yearns and lunges longer in silences and grumbles, richly unsatisfied, starved from introducing so many endings that the void provides noise, a home, food. To grief, the car needs washing and must enter a similar burial structure, a casket clean, respectable. Inside neither spoken nor gleamed. That wax, caffeine are rsvp anomies, the expected invitations to keep the sadness in us occupied while the body performs welcomes for a drawn-out goodbye; time for you to take time out for- just not at a funeral. On the casket is the triangle field of blue and stars and a football with autographs of alma mater and the face of sensitivity and the face of the casket that we kiss and consume the icon, the prayers, the fools gifts of the ancient burial practices, comfort things- for the living memorial, timeless meeting of people never met by way of dont remember me I remember you when you were this gotten sohow arenice to Height as a marker of a passage of a time, to have arrived at a point not a line. Times delirious tenses reminiscing the old times because you cant reminisce the new. Delivered, by the possibility of an after-spirit and the physicality of the body token, here. The funerals deliverance. A farmers hands and a childs, the priests; A harvest of reminders. His mind was gone and he forgot us still loved us. The Lords prayer in Greek and English Spoken by all from memory, or feeling. Yet a palm more sensitive than a prayer. The warm hands of the priest, the pallbearers, the distant cousins close, now gray now told retold embracing with empathetic hands, the eyes of touch, the gentleness of the clasp, the hold, with telling duration, legation, pressure, signifying life. How one might hold an apple, a loved one. The end of a line, the lines of the faces of well mourners, that have no starting or stopping point, lines of a healthy melancholy, a soft sigh but a stronger smile, the last respect working up to the casket it was his time, produce slow to ripe soon rotten, a small share to be perfect before another harvest refills truckloads storeloads bellyloads, the seed to bring a thousand harvests for the living to grow so to mourn his passing and their own. We forget how words deliver us, time without tense rounds toward twelve, the twelve bus that runs past the funeral home, Union cemetery, the hospital, the produce shop the Orthodox church as the seed through a root, a clock-hand, deaths participle. touch n go. A car wash cycles; the sorrows compose: goodbye hades, goodbye harvests, goodbye uncle.

29 Invitation for Dorothy McGuire But, when the days of golden dreams had perished, And even Despair was powerless to destroy; Then did I learn how existence could be cherished, Strengthened, and fed without the aid of joy. - Remembrance, Emily Bronte Sincerity is muddled. A father sells his daughters truth for her happiness in the scionbroken estate, by unforeseen deviations of the clock, the false-vowed couple regrets the invitation of the mornings promise to keep the day: The truth will always hurt yet the offense of it is a dear and right pain for its spell plants a quick excuse and grows a reconciliation, that folly can prove fountainful, that sincerity is the salve of candor, that fate is not freed by operation. The transitory ghost of the self set alight by the effusion of an open resolve to be buried someone to the world, to bring the body whether sick, whether poor, upon an earnest, unyielding attraction which defines, which binds, source to spring, tangles in wiles of sense when shared between decapitating equivocalness, past-focused diopters, suppliers of mis-promised time, that, when, suppose, a man chances to alter, to doctor, upon a woman, with coverture, for her benefit, for her fleeting memento positing duplicitous memory not ungenerously, though seeming a wound an abyss, her death, unkempt, pent, regarded rather as his monitor, his repair, mistaking her muted assurance, reserved gesture, agreeing diction as want for care, that by invitation, his invitation, for benevolent bondage,

30 a proposal for negating clarity for her keeping culmination unfinished, mortality awakes surely yet and known to her is the snare of her husbands breast. Bad faith may not be distinguished from sincerity except In one clear instance: death. The condemned happen Upon the invitation as the chance at essence, finally to claim I surely am and will be, that a husband or an-other who will cast shadows where there is no sun will cause a wife to misunderstand her imprisonment as love, that she must transcend, that embraces Sartre. Revealed, thus, after, (therefore poised) in the reclaiming of integrity, a reluctant initiation to a blushing contract, a didactic stairwell slowly composing her self up to temperate right-forgiving, to graceful equanimity, to remembrance of the first invitation not the last, that with loss found worthwhile, or trite, or dire, she amends, she remands to an affirming and restorative acceptance without the enchantment.

31 All Is Needed for family gatherings, spoken on the winebreath of love, are requests for confirmation that I did the right thing that you forgive me that you know I love you, right? It is understood. The heart needs a bottle opener and a blood-gathering rite, birth, marriage, death, drunk dry so many times before, yet persistent in thirst, that this is where we should be, the only thing left for one with nothing and one with everything to share. We sit close on a distant relatives furniture and gesture together, arm re-assuring shoulder, you know I care. Mouth to mouth resuscitation.

32 Im not Rappaport A mind for the forgotten is the river crossing to nostalgia. Meek Hannah that stitched, with her tangled fingers, Bent buttresses that worked fine, neat prints, A ballet of conglomerate hunchbacks; She hides her hands in her dress, on Ludlow Street. Sharp, angular sun on face of the stoops of the late afternoon, Portraits are painted from what she retreats from At the library desks, reading rooms With books, alterations of her truth, Pages for children, pages that absolve nothing For her. No words for her Words drowned in the soft, dissembled features The sun made sharp and in the apartment above Her stoop where she left herself. I feared the urgent Calling of salvation and she died for it; Love, at a distance, the rapport of the resistant. An artist in the Park Reminds me that Common blood is shared In common places, That in the womans sketchbook, The attempt is for Community and a summation Of parts to a whole. She worked threads into whole and was undone. Hannah with her gangly fingers, Wrenched, misshapen pillars forming delicate Scarves, caps, and shawls at knotted detriments To her. Save her. No words for. To age by cycles of remembrance And loss, as a far youth, one fetching girl I died with, A seamstress, a shunned angel of ghostly disposition, to my admiration, to my watchfulness, a purpose. The long, unbearable walk past that evening Stoop. Ghosts haunting one another. There Our gazes met on occasion With unseen eyes. A particular sketching girl I flirt with In the park. Shes on a kick or a binge or a wagon. She bruises easily

33 And has a sick daughter. Life bleeds from her to me. The eyes of evening upon us, sunk, Set deep within wrinkled caricature Of the once honorable retention of my stare. Man once gentle, worth singing. The capacity to live for oneself is a trial Of unseeing eyes, of indigent cemeteries, Lines of sight, sharp, distancing sun, ethereal waters. I am there now, then, in ages stored by water, Dilating pupils expanding regret to affection, and the high Constitution of place is lost to memory recurrent On The Lake, in the city I mournsfor those yet to mourn; Shadows settle softly on Strawberry Fields memorial.

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Fall

35

Inscription (Encryption) At The Empty Tomb of Prosody The sun does not write tomorrow yet bodes End lines unravel to timesick middles, pens riddle Brittle emblems to rhyme-less, ink-scorched odes. With chronologies absent, weary, old-shoe sonneteers feign lament, Their Words as from bugles stet, stress, Forms till fracture, Sore feet wrinkling from age; Ancient cadence fountains not the dry page, As anachronous pastes of numb sequence, Virtuosic leech of antiquity, From time to spirit purge experience Till lore abstracts current epiphany And in thirst for canon of laurel wells, In drowned dawn, echo unreturned, verse spilled.

36

Xenolith Troglodyte pounding. stone from story. till fracture to rock pieces. persist, mash to fine grain. by such music to shambles will play memory to monumental ruin, the base over complexities of bone. lifeless clay wells, from drinking to quench on the boulder of nonsenses in the casting of its liquid broken histories of rubble, reflect the crags of the mind and precipice to stony heath of the prospect unspoken. Tor! metamorphic outcrop, ballast or intrusion cleave metallic gravel from barren mind chaff grit from limit damp spirits petrify, condense eyes to chondrule, dolmen for the worminfested brains, ossify soft dummy heads in matrices filled parch river beds Tor! collect bowlders at granule pinnacle fossilized tufa after the aggregate of time that common pebbles marvel at the feat of a mountain cut down to marbles.

37 A Bridge Over The Sea She came up under a rock which bore a torpid Provencal cit-izen with a fishing pole. He saw a blonde girl emerge from the combers with lobsters wriggling in her hands. She said, "Could you please watch these for me?" and put them on the rock. The fisherman dropped his pole. The Silent World by Jean Yves Costeau I turn to the window failing to see Three muses at the back of the bus Accosting me dude, come here I, dude, turn my back to beauty. Fuck you then. The mystery and danger of the sea. This fuck from inspiration This cussing awakening Occurs to me to be directed at me. I turn from the window not failing to see The first muse approaching asking too sweetly Could I borrow a dollar? It occurs immediately To me that to borrow is to have, Yet I pull a dollar from my wallet And she even softer sweet saccharine Could I borrow another dollar? And pull a dollar from my wallet, another. If every muse asked a dollar, like every journey demanded adjournment, None would pay the toll, every journeyman Would be a walking stone, a wall holding out For the delayed attack, because every other possible road Would lead neither to the battle nor the inspiration, only the stone. But I boarded the bus open. I was allowed The capability to be tolled, or played, or communicated. A storm is building to the north. The bus drives north. Is two dollars an epoch worth? The second muse approaches me asking my name age number status purpose. I answer with a mix of lies and forgetfulness. I confess my age. They ask if I drank on my birthday. They say they will when they turn twenty-one. I am being aged by the young. I concoct a story to avoid one. We journey forth since no journey is backwards. Their beggaring for the fare to return what where Their ambrosia caves reside by the sea is a forward of its own. Could I remain

38 The days admiration, provocation, their fire? Or will water win out? Will rain dictate the drowning of our sorrows? Theirs: Shopping. I: Follow. The conversation quickly descends To turning tricks, oldest professions, and humiliation For cash. The third muse descends, shrug it off and laugh, Upon my shoulder and asks me when my birthday is? Their questions are predatory, they speak dirty with clean Faces, rings in tongues and noses, not piercings but instinct; To keep out of the abyss. Their southern is an accent, Neither belle nor twang, but a deliriousness that lends itself well To escape, north into the city out of the craw Of Southern Ohio, the bold recklessness necessary to approach This strange passenger, a poet with three beers and no bottle opener. They ask of me: rank their beauty, one through three a game petty and little. So I get political. I reason everyone is good looking in their own way. I paid. They see Through me not seeing, know I am not lying but am not being truthful. Philosophy. Angry, they ask of me: where ya coming from, where ya headed? Work. Home. I ask of them: where are you going? The mall. It is summer. The age of no age. The age of play. The age to admit to drinking Under age. These muses are young. Therefore sublime, untouchable. They dream Of prostitutes like Joan of Arc; Ulysses at the stake. Bloom. O to reckon with fate, if the bus I had not boarded, sirens would not transform to muses, windows would not be seen For aquariums. Ugliness would exist but not be beautiful. Yet I didnt walk, girls younger Speak of when I grow up, though I talk of honor and marriage. They speak To videotapes and videodesperados makin it, play. I see storms and scorn in her scraggly Yarn of hair. Muses seem fair to any yet the poet dreads their beauty and pens his fear. This tris legomenon further deviates into flirtatious advances, propositions, sin speaking Loudly to be heard over the engine of epic transport. The sea crashes down as the muses hop from the back to the front to the back of the bus Like breakers, like waves, at my shoulder, a forward, a flash, an accosting, flesh sizzling. Do you like me? Can I have another dollar? I pull the yellow cord. They speak my name. I know not theirs. Are you getting off? I just got on. Can I have a hug? Clumsily we join at the waist and pull away. I have at once created and emasculated. Brace myself then for the stop. Stop. I get off. The sea holds many secrets but not love. Muses laugh at their creation. I lost two dollars and gained. Where Im going, I must go back. Where trouble goes, angels follow, angels that scratch at walls, to wear down the stone into a diamond to stick in their tongue.

39 Ereptor: Epilogue The sun makes eastern promises it never seems to keep because while the sun sows, the moon reaps. The weight of peters keys is inspiration to. sulking legs with stars upon the knees, a mans mark of a womans misery plotted through a dripping nose in the soft basilica and the weakest of the bones. Songs of the homeland in a new country, home gulped from the bottle of disownment. Here, stories are birthmarks, scars, and tattoos. The son cannot escape the father by crossing water, so he drinks. If fortune knew what it needed it would be free. An advertisement in a dream sells something only dreams can buy and when that something is sold which cannot be bought, it is fear that awakens desire. The body is alert to its system. Geometry is simple. There are four sides of context and one screen. There are two hands with which to hold things. Supply and demand. Without saying a word, it speaks. The believer sees but is not seen, Hears but is not heard. If faith were alive, itd be a bird. Art is control. Art is determined stroking. Art is coy provoking destruction. Tickling a dragon will get you a laugh and get you burned. Retreat, retreat, to the Franciscan garden, crucifix and forever flowers where Nothings sweet because nothing sours. All remains, canvas overgrown, narrators write God like their heroes. Twixt comedy and drama stands reproach While thus binds us, thus does coach. A kiss through a silk scarf, a filter to the sense, twining touch by a cloths love, stitch together. Advertisements comfort as they challenge. Religion dies in its sleep, art keeps, forces its hand Into the hand of the recipient who then must confess, find common pitch, move past it. The pagan drinks of his pleasure what he is given. The monk expects to be blasted.

40
By The Tumid River Of Red Face Paint

Though bladed corn be lodged and trees blown down; Though castles topple on their warders' heads; Though palaces and pyramids do slope Their heads to their foundations; though the treasure Of nature's germens tumble all together, Even till destruction sicken; answer me An Cn. Pompeium censes tribus suis consulatibus, tribus triumphis, maximarum rerum gloria laetaturum fuisse, si sciret se in solitudine Aegyptiorum trucidatum iri amisso exercitu, post mortem vero ea consecutura, quae sine lacrimis non possumus dicere? ---------Cicero---De Divinatione 2.22
set the Earth reverberating......see how they fall death alone can still

Five. This Way To Egress Down on High Street, straight round the horseshoe forgings, kinky greased red-hots, plastic beer suds, brazenly glazed donuts; soft tufts of woozy, sodded guts squeeze inta outr tableaux. cracks in the stratum, a haruspex lurkin bout the portajohns on the Drive up the WH Estivation ceases, awaken conker beasts and After the sop, in Remembrance (Park), theyve forgot To let nature memorialize herself as hot dog carts, Gravel pits, and rotc artillery guns set for future victories Rather than past losses frame marching drills Of out of step recruits blundering on wet ears, As Maenads frenzy, in juxtaposition by the adjoining road, Amid these clumsy marchers, kid commanders in tennis shoes And sweatpants shooting with their index fingers, crawling, bellydown, Patriots in the mud. St John, in endgame arena, retches up the skull Of a drum major, floods the black well of its vacant wishes, its occupants.

41 Let the torches burn, and cudchewers yearn For imperious points, under hot, night-killing lamps; Young, young soles meld to fit muscular mold of the face of the emperor, whose slaves are thrown To kosher shechita, best blood for best earth And no education to show fer it. Vestals conceal liquor and suppurating weals, Adorning amulets from the fetid tree and torn, skimpy mantles, no more blushing at unmentionables discarded fruit yellows under bus stop shelters A combination and a form indeed, Where every god did seem to set his seal Hobo taking a leak at the ATM on High. His coin cup rattles to the rhythm of a cannonballs last splash in Newport, where the percussion leaks out to Street and rattles in frequency the construction fences: synchronicity: a pared form of redemption. Revel gathering an entranced crowd reminds the voice of its power to sway the fortune of a queen in the beheading hour. Incensed sucker punches to blindspots draped with rowdy justification, galloping thletes fill the jaws lift with hyperbolic challenge of aggressive bodies, the blunt hypnosis incrisised sympathy upon a birthmark remarkable, umbilical cords torn out by the teeth, rough riders in link to Omni in peripety, crystal orbits sputter and collapse though disenfranchised, fulfill a ragged sequence to quell the frontlines of their doubt. Room to kick, until the fire burns out. On Shabbat dawn, the swan sees red The miserable have no other medicine Augurs with their buckshots go lookin for an excuse; indolence in the sunspots, or the color Blue (Scientists say the sol is fadin too soon) Haussmannization to destroy to grow Dichotomy 2001, September puns, O incorruptible muse, On a double take, Ill timed, free bibles, for recognition From a snickers unbelief where the scorns of time Are atheists and futility in the shell of a dust jacket. The delusory seed with genius loci never to be inhaled,

42 Broods so that the shoe of a hundred thousand tongues Clasps its throat for thirst and glossolalia In confabulation incarnate, deception of a sundog, Dithyramb suddenly whirring overheat And all-consumption tb returns from dust Uphacking deuteronomy from lungs of bent-legged sheep. the dire wolf Six hundred pounds of sin Was grinnin at my window All I said was "come on in" The game is senseless. Death be damned, Meshuga On the wethered shore, if he ask a fish, will it give him a serpent? The Musa god strips down and will not ripen anymore

Pork Chop Hill every Saturday, the binaries of the road Friction on the floodplain, the vervex with deciduous teeth is sworn to the current, the pilgrimage to Megiddo loses a member, The Master of the Horse o'erleaps the Horse, babbles on, retreats to a plaguing atavism. cigarette butts. Relapse. Routine. Popped balloons. Put money in thy purse. Beyond convalescence, we leech the ink of prophets, Telling time in pours. Snuffing out in screams. So put money in thy purse wasteful calumnies in collusive contest, are not on field, but in atmosphere, slanderous itchins of intent, peeling leaves to reveal violently copulating convergent plates, rifts in the crusts, nosebleeds on the tier. A charley horse is put down on the avenue bridge, thrown over the side; A mob cannot flinch: A harbinger among dead weights. (I Clarett know only seems) A stampede down the deeper breach (and the gall of my Lady M) worse than thought before. for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. Give me thy panging bell; Give me thy chaos, Thy victory title, Pay them to the balefire of my breast. On my return from panassus, past a lake of specular imitate, a pond with ambitions

43 The Mirror of Galilee, reeking of fowl droppings and bilious green glass. Upon reflective jumping produced horny feet and water strider sandals, The cold-err amphitheatre in decline with unpalatable foliage, wet newspaper, browning folio and brisk resignation. Yet Yet! in perversitys helms, the satyr remains when Corso bears the head of Pentheus! (Agave brings the stage down.) The hopes and fears of all the years/Are met in thee to-night. May he forgive the blight. In this ossuary of dreams, paranoia proposes to the predators of the skeletal pillar, nothing for necrophagy, nor architecture. sore rain shunned. Equine: fillets on bun or awaiting the captive bolt in locker rooms with standin still is losin branded on their foreheads. Incompatible grafting. Cacophonic dementia. Banana peels hold ominous purpose in the mystic carousels and foggy magic tobacco clouds engender. The atheists nightmare penetrates, avenges by quandary, wool gathers on the carrion. I, in the fully pecked carcass of the student union, glance and dye Red for viola, among the walls abstract paintings of paint brushed charlestons, precipitating color In plush sitting rooms, on the student slept, hole stricken wheeled furniture, I write Of the gravel rooftops and the poor gray reductive smokestacks of the college collage Of poor architectural logistics, narrow sidewalks, canned newspaper holders, rainwater In the righteous paths. Hop and a step a mush through the wet for the squirrels. Ah such hopeful criticism in the op-ed section of the student paper, we who sleep Through film class, draw to a desk our doodles crude, crank our necks to the clock, peruse A window filled with other trekking students, beared and baggaged, hurried and booted. History does not linger long in our century On transitory thrones, Plaza, gray clouds balanced on a horn, linger unsettling close to our crowns; A rapid tautology asserts itself By rapid assertion, compels to reinforced millennium Through telling you whats best for you steel girder cages for bucolic beast, Saturdays hero, soon Sundays stooge He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha the element of cant overwhelms, heavy with loyalty colors, Draping flags of the mother. Fame and all its inherent fetters. Scarlet gilted bodies, unbreathe, writhing for the shore These Augean stables want for heroic janitor, but What's on the leaves ain't dew no more

44

Sacrificed by the light of the false star of fortune Play fair: Rot slow. The quick wheel gets the spot. An assault of enervated memorials. the glory of his nostrils is terrible. When the ghost of Banquo steals our seats When the architects meet to demolish systematically our lords hall, Foundation and all, the hectic ohio Players will shout carmens murder from loves lift hill of honey and gunfire Stuck to the floor, at the Hineygate burning effigies On the sixth terrace unorthodoxly puking for drink Where urbanity slums in hellish circles Strangled in deconstructive dust In leer-ward detours to mend her we end her Sic transit gloria mundi tickers Across the night sign of the Hindenburg, And only the prayin or pedestrian Notice then cannot translate; Temptation turns archaic. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-5ZKb-B2aQ Four. Malice is a pleasant pastime kickoff and alls hell. Blacksmith in a sweater vest. want to buy some illusions, slightly used? Apple cores, Bloated pageantry, fray the mane of our advances cause we coolas our ancestors carmine prisms of despondency, we hang effigies with worry beads from our alma maters tit, head of a horse-chestnut grown yet unmistakably puerile gorgedand not recognizably human. ohio girls rock past the litter on the sidewalk, sing the stale air. Alms for fanaticism Alms for fanaticism at the jessse owens narthex Signifying nothing but fury, Abstract sculpture out of space Pyramid gapes and nearly draws blood, representational arrows limit play as harrows, the chamber of intentional regulation referee the imagination to standardized fields of shape. does a subject body have an object for reflection? Not in the artists intention, nor architects. Orange cone sun, river-hocked steamed birds, spit hoses wetdown dust, the clay cancer. Children break a window and skip into oncoming traffic. Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax half slabs of beef, succulent, blasphemous pork, Chicken scraps, Flesh-full, armored, young, young letes rodomontade Corralled into the hypogeum, out the via dolorosa tunnel LChaim my boys! To you and your strides

45 Over hot matchlight charcoal. A bad batch of stony apples. Gee green inked tongue, his chorus of jawboning faculties croak: Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax Yea, the glorious oblivion is over, tamed. The spoiled extensions of victory, Tamed; parade to rain Gamenights riot firelight a faithful devil, Like a tooth and tongue claiming its proportions. Paralyzing, the mule sans heir with a lingering at-loss, Anemic; Sensibility took the piss out of the fire. Outstanding debts dissolutely claimed in neutered winter. Somehow 2002, Fainting red, the contents of Gutted apartment in street field rushers devouring dirtgreen, Flame-seethers huddled round the polyester entrails, and blas glow Bravo of our young, young mens violent mezzo Forte and the slain goal posts. The night curds. the moonlight spoils, Victoria, non praeda is less. The Holbrook Orgy; only a raffishiness lost in avarice. from sweet milk to sourKyrie Eleison, but I doubt it. Fattening frogs for snakes, young, young heathens you crazy handful of nothin them ol testament vacinates damn brian jones ta hell, and keith richards one foot in already somehow knew a rolling stone depart from me, ye that work iniquity from the salt of the earth Se la voce dell'onor in te appien non ammuti', Dio m'esaudi'! the milk of the eye blazes full and films mock sun glazes broken limbs These are the gavage people A bete noire headline GAG REFLEX PROSTRATED By a workingmans spread Too large to be a meal, simmers in ambivalence Carmen.Carmendisaccordingly, The game is lost. Pensive, we boldly spell our doom in a three-syllable proclamation where only catcalls carry through the zipper windows of this malarkey aviary

46 where Men arent posed to cry yet arid legacies may be an exception, desiccation at the squeak of civilization, waters stagnant, play clock stopped. The vengeance eagle craves, and the bell dolor moans Ohhhhhhhhhh The flood of a stadium built upon the sand. Population: band. o what a cruel colonnade, no better than a bird stoop. abandoned by winter. a pillared skeleton, yet this is you. Almost Admirable. impertinently sick; Dr. Snook with his Olympic handgun, with his neutered flock, soiled hammer, Carmen, is a callin, for inundation by crooked staff; navel-tearing hook. lawn chair Barotrauma; Rites set to caution; A lachrymose cadence count; A wolf whistle/groaning reveille, oFf-kEy. Riverside H births this hollow Greek gift; and all that is said is come in Behold the thing lesser than yourself Myths fail, One night she started drinking Indolent works and days to ruin Down by the river Progress assumes She tied up the river and gilds its throne And backed the ocean down two-thousand hex whenever, no longer to linger in deep sleep the patterns awake and the line to error operates. young young lonely lovers lusting to buy a phase of the moon from a woman in the flesh of worms, the badge and blue eyes. Run out of town on the high street sting, powerlusts entrapment. I have no queen. Treachery. I Clarett who knew nothing fore the illusional prison now carry my mind past bars to Descartes and think I Clarett I, scar of failed potential. Christ without the redemption. Denny Hall collapsin round my ears Puddles, parked trucks, in front of doorways sign no entrance no exit dispatched lovers chant with ravaged lips furling frontal futurity,

47 Snook and The Book Thumper at the pulpit of an oval rant: When I was young People wore what they had on it is the fire which defines us. will the Coordinator of the high press box lead the blue chip studs from this drink? (Remember Lots Wife?) No. We will not flee and we will not blink! Barbeque soldiers at the spit of the desolate stage, Scarf Ruggieri brains with ribbitting bulbous chins, guzzling the pyre. Birds of the chirp, Creep the ether feather day at the dazes, a weak play of Go Sorrows to stone deplorable clicks on the tongues of a bow tie Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? Afterthoughts used at an earlier date, coachspeak, save gas, expiration. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N8Pt2xM088& Three. Blabber 'n smoke a whistle in a concourse resonates more than its meaning where the derelict belly-crawler bites where abstruse merchants peddling discarded cores in a whimless air of reckoning thin to lapping tongues, seduce within for spite activate ultimatums saved for this play, the ko rule and its eternal repealing; he that drinks all night, and is hanged betimes in the morning, may sleep the sounder all the next day. There is no dancing among canned regiments, we stilt by toothpicks on Paid the cost to be the boss, a herbaceous of insolvent aggradation A slime trail from destitute riparian to the rotten corms, The Man-holed landscape, the universal joke, Nonfeasance rules the day, restraint As ever was, Dam straight, Played round like an oppressive carnival theme

48 Monsieur Fire awaits the wing. I Clarett, visionary and hamartian-mistaken, trade in the glory and pads for a jumpsuit and a philosophers phone. The game is limbo. No funerals on Ur-Holy day. The dead will wait. Tell them this morning is not just traffic, a death of a morning blocked Intersection, services effected emergency exit, closed. The summer construction season is weathered with orange and yellow cones Academically set in the name of progress. the world is whiplashed from so much starting and stopping bumpers. Buffets resurrect the feast, blind beside the beacon to die of thirst beside the fountain, soda pop frothing over bottle tops. The lamb drank of the air as if water, found no nourishment and wondered off. welcome to the mount blanc of the marching band a shuddering crane casts and presides over the horizon. And indiscernibly builds in destruction. I Clarett flew the nest too early from this de-restitute peristyle clasping a harlots rosette, A faded facade set with stain glass as kitsch cathedral a Glass jaw swallowing its own ancient entrance, Incisive eruptions no one has felt yet. And never will. Faust without the resentment (repentance). Lightning strikes like a man realizing something for the first time. These bones remind me of my children. Clobbered on College Road, storm in his head, philosopher becomes pedestrian, the meditations splattered across the windshield, bits of tome split and stuck to rubber, bone and muscle, blood and hair, substance and attribute, road and kill. Earbuds in the ears of the deaf. Sunglasses in a city with no sky. The panhandlers hang themselves from the arches down on High first he must suffer many things I Clarett, victim to a culture of kings, am recruited by regents, dropped out in a Janus-fiesta Some say I coulda freed Prometheus yet in my liver, there are vulture wings I Clarett, to be blessed before the boon and be rejected by this generation. That when I Clarett raised my arms in lights and became a gravitational epic simile, for champion now fallen, blinded once king, son without a father, that would youths formation re-set for another down I Clarett must still wander by fate the wasteland of fair grounds Since ol man river is dat ball n chain that never does nothin cept drown.

49

Chills quick you Voices pick you Crows hex you TBDBL, toil and trouble In the pillory to a tributary, the gated gibbet sdaeh rieht edih dna nur yeht semoc niar eht fI INRI_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

yea, for He is The Word, His Name between God and orphan lost on the single symbol, the lack of ego, for His Name is everything in, writ or spoke. Add an Iota, from Logos to broke. The crows devil-may-care anywhere cept Union Cemeter. Bag o winds on Woodys grave, a bag of tortilla chips, Its a hard time livin the good life; Lamb incurvated to goat John, Jude, Assimilation Assimilation Assimilation Yet shall he live Latherhead forth re-rinses, with grave napkin and a daggered smile Memory irrecoverable. Fancy is the fools denial. Dada dada dadadadadadadadadadada Hobo chang ba hobo chang ba hobo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5E3wWfKO-I Two. THE PACE THAT KILLS! get ya program fa! games of myopic mirth pomp hyped circumstance! for certain autumn spheres where decorumdeclension blur let supinator kids play butcherin, garbed in hoplite torsos, cavalry breeches

50 bridles, blinders, snaffle bits eleven fenced Equus crowns spurred on farrier-shaped assemblage There's a whole lotta women, Out in red on the streets today And the river keep a talkin' But you never hear a word it say Aeschylus glabra battle cries slurr evocations for vengeance, poison poster boast oracles spill under gray buckle nimbus haloed with rosary nuts, brass feet jelly roll grass scripts, supposed congregations that expose pagan aroma a slacked androgyny army on scarlet-letter day, with bare, volatile dictum on aligned chests bolden withers in storm; sagged decrees toward The new American Museum Not yet achieving conflagration The artist and the hero compare envisions and afterthoughts for the twenty first century. but mostly came up with nothing Lane aflame. clapper jack pom. rioted palm-pawns drench violent blues, hyper bruised grapes agape for alcho-fuel libations. slip through the sideshow curtains, witness the swollen parking altars, wined gravel hallows, epic swoopings through perspective and past, pissants with delirious puissance hold chicken scratch boxflaps ostentate up into the downcast trodden, defeated V-signs pleading: need two tickets to Revelation, to yarded catharsis in soggy parades; a cleft dome palate, a hippodrome velum a foaming steed feeding on snakes. (The rotunda crumbled nto the Olentang bled from the mouth after twenty trenched gashes to the side of the head it was converted to a stockyard and forgot) Lady Macbeth didnt expect blood to wash off so easily, so she went at the skin.

51

Umbrellas open as the delayed flower, encounter the death of cyclists To die of thirst beside the fountain, not taking necessary precautions For faith, eyes look to lines that cross that the vehicle stops. I PUNISH myself And what I hurt you shall hurt For every pain belonging to me belongs to you The force of my own breath; Muscles, ripples, tough love, ligament, tendon, crotch, ACL; My reps and tests, the readings of my pulse, the measure of my blood and air through my Helmet. The sniff of sweat and perspiration, and of the men I rub and with and against A few hits, a tackle of kisses, in a uniform play of left and right, the artificial leaves of turf Are our bed, the touch of skin to skin is enough to delight. Our supple brains, dinged and ringed as a Sunday bell, Go through life on a lot of touchdowns, on memory loss, on offside Thoughts; There are millions of games left (but this is your last one). If a body meets a body If stone resembles stone, and bone, bone Choose the river over the road Let the new flesh be the new clover Catharsis is an engine turning over http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ltCt-vleqM One. Kneel and say an Ave there Drink On Sloopy, Droopily Drink On Bakcheia, Bakcheia, Bakcheia Seki Atari Vamanos (If theres an art to dyin, this aint close) To the superstitious lanes of feedlot on buzzed expanses Oh Where a slough palace sinks sic kinks in drown gas and dumpster alley orgies High Where tongue pillars fork at gates, Where dam flipped auto-clogs, Where columns suffocate

52 Woe a battle cry competing omens dip scales, knot skin, swallow whole mien-foliate dignity for gamesake At, Hubris Retribution, Ate Hail! Hail! Smashed Victory Honor To Rape and Sow O' How Firm Thy Dead Ends Time and Change Mewly Bends Kingdom choked on a cornucopia bone. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0X_XPMGWxM

53 the if in when for all we know just like before a beckoning for the brokenhearted architecture to set to the scattering of birds at the fingers of a piano chord playing that perforating instinct to remember, no destination, one last fishing trip before autumn migrations cease, before the town falls all around its buildings, to cast, to last it out without, without a bell to wake you to the stop, keeps the passenger humble. what if there is a destination? what if things would be different? for all we know just like before we meant it, we left.