No Movie Tonight

Scene:

Nuts encased in sateen.
Track up to a chin of pure blank squares.
A Sunoco attendant freebasing in jammies.
Exit character through a convulsing exercise
machine.

(All people love movies with no significance
or any letters written onscreen. Or any letters
for that matter. It’s like lost art. Expensive shades
missing a screw.)

Scene:

Tea with exotic herbs said to possess
impossible aphrodisiacal properties poured
for the envoy from Sunoco. His beauty has been
touted by mobs of queens. A vehicle is perceived
approaching.

(Images featuring a yellow van create tension
in female audiences. Just as the words “I can’t
indicate” distress men. Cause, effect and common
good are not regarded as essential to the fix.)

Scene:

Extreme close up of genitals and nail gun.
Curtains flutter behind the indistinct pair.
A sandwich, roast beef au jus, in the foreground
attracts fruit flies. Off screen an intervention
is taking place.

(Canned goods instantly evoke a sense of sympathy.
“I comprehend your predicament” they imply.
“The dire consequences to your penis are quite
identifiable. I feel that I know you.” Essays follow.)

Scene:

A needle pierces skin. We pull out to reveal
a familiar perineum that appears to be growing
fins. Another jab, then another. The entire
penis swells and assumes the shape of
the Suez Canal. Anthemic music up.

(See notes.)

Looser and Clocked

Jettisoned with the sweets.
It’s less gross he said than watching her
eat with her utility mouth in.

A termite meticulously read
the latest account of the last
tiff. Jesus suckered his men.

And so either of two great griefs
has sent you back to wine country.
Jamming artificial intelligence

lets the air issue silently
from your self backstabbing
blow up companion.

In a cheap wooden box lie
the émotives and none of them
définies. Jokes like shouting Bonzai

in a crowded skirt. Destiny came in
bags. Bound with luck for Rapa Nui.
Your stone passport no longer counts.

Later Jesus called nine one two. Pairs of
spelunkers bounce across the vulval
steam drains. The operator uncut him.

One opportunity in a million found
its audience. Demons portraying the banana
peel in the mode of the dance.

But a man has no s. Many vie for the infections
proffered by the expressionless elk. Jerry visits
a vector near his lost plot of stardom.

A ladder douses errant flowers with the contents
of a pity burning lamp. The overall setting may be
laughable but he doubts the carpenters union

got the memo.
April 30, 1945.
Stuck in the sweat tree again.

The Irish Survives Itself (The Sleep of the Just II)

Now that our store teeth are in high def we feel rightfully
invincible. Backmasking your vanity childhood we got lost
in that day you wasted playing chicken on the wrong side

of the tracks. Soon, though, your heroin arm underbed
willies were collated. To be transported in separate safety
cranks across a blind scrim prairie to deep complexes

under non-existent mountains. Comic anti-semitic resorts

where we have coffee and grin swearing. Our daily streaks
come off hourly. That prairie is half an Earth’s worth gaining.
The steps you’d extemporized were swept for any secret

and/or recyclable bugs. Even this early we knew you
to be a potential preemptive idol. Years were spent
underground eating off your carbon and well buttering

a crackpot aggregation of pox blankets,

bread buckets to martyr your doll collection to the Daddy
Max. Wild Hill, ring a bell? Hillock? Do you remember
being made to sit lungless through fifteen straight years

in end to end screenings of Dances With the Hoops?
A free and equitable association of cut cards played just
above the Frontiersman trained on your empathically minute

carbine and damp wadding? There is no one to confirm
in your favorite shoes. No reason we should wonder who
you might say you think that is in the borrowed radium

suits. No one sees creamed corn anywhere, moron!

Striking the familiar death mask poses of the friendly
pathogen society. (A course you can fail to take from home)
Or of the vanquished without poison or television privileges.

Who can you trust to translate an unsafe lunch from the Pig
Mandarin back into cellular code we are incapable of
being freaked out by in any smoking veil of an accuracy?

Those sentries are inhalating again. More procedural naked
Twister to the tune of a nascent acne, glass canisters chock-
a-block in hospital colored chicken. Scratch-n-seize packets

of the gizmo juice. It’s almost too big! read her menu of elevator
disasters. Or an exquisitely freeze-framed chronicle of same
sex drift as ancient undocumented heartbreak. That cheese

isn’t even real Amerikan Krab. So Ambassador Lo-Fat fainted
and was saved by his Ray-Ban attitude. The gag is in the serum.
He conducts your up arrow to last season’s child face

down in her Kefauver apple pie. The fulcrum of time outs.
Time to get pleasantly irrelevant. Individually wrapped
in a time-share seminar on pivotal razor replacements.

And you go to the surgery in your hungry pj’s.

A collapsing knee has your name in diamonelles on it.
But the temporary sky concealed a Galuth choking fast
lanes in destructo tumors. Amiable as special equipment fuck

ups complete with missing warranty, serio-cum stained glassine.
The mob invokes the musical cosmos rule, natch. Ballroom
executions by Jerry Lewis-Stalin and a tubercular baby

giraffe ensue. They make a dark woman with an animal breast
feeding contain the cleansing fire. A collar symbol survivor?
No more so than a kingdom eulogized in the random

or a generation of vanishing plates. The recommended chemical
peel that erases this interminable waiting is just outside
the waiting room door watching Oprah with the sound off.

There is no breath in the system.

Dear Diary: No one killed for the art of justice
in days. But there is a school from the dark windows
of which you are watched waiting for a bus each morning.

Nature she said is a dance of the watcher and the burning bus
its passenger freezing at the stop. Then she came hard and left
without opening her eyes. The late president of continuity.

Famous first words she said, like muy bueno or cig me.

Just as the throats of the universe carpool and sing that train song.
We all join in. I see your boy gave himself a posthumous Oscar
for his last known orgasm. All speech exceeds the time limit.

A musician will be born if you don’t do something quick.

These are the dangers you embrace when you become
a thanker of ideas. By the very bakelite deities who conferred
the honor acting together was produced a never-before-seen

episode of Baretta. Was that my louder than eye torture
voice? he fretted. Was the noise that was heard felt
to be of a suitable harshness to distract the dying

light from settling in all cozy among the non-anti-smokers?
None of his failings had practiced enough. Yet her glibness
had very little to do with her tongue technique. She had

already captured his attention when she burned
his debit card in protest of the global war of nutrition
she thought he was thinking of starting.

A swell gathering at the gates.

The children at least had had some help from the fact
that they wielded butterfly knives. The children
had not considered the fact a fact. If you butter a piece

of bread before it’s been baked you’re traveling in a cat
carrier of some other party’s decoration. If you think
about butter it is vanquished and we need more west.

The process reinvents the process server.
The vest repopularizes vastness in a cotton.
The west wins itself over.

And the weeds that may, will.

Titular Head of the Bread Basket

the otter cannot see the other otter approaching under the ice

at night or the eel

against the eel colored blind spot on the spine of the culvert

destined in a fable

to reappear as a non-threatening penguin with airs of entitlement

and bleeding knee

an oink meant as a presentiment to the commission of the criminal

act of guffawing

at the visible boiling point in his education, buffed out by a gear in

a murder addition sign

and too well shaved for an emissary of the razors hailing on D.C.

take five shaved men

on a bandstand playing celebration to the chief, flying stormbound

against the comic rage

of Sarah McLaughriot in a perfectly white awning, winter pigeon

mannequins blown out

from their winter coats, twanged at by ice mosquitoes in toques



"There and then you'll be able to trial run your elephant fart routine

see if to do the unrated cut is acceptable

or you might get your share of ornaments removed from your senate seat

by swift downward pressure on the truth

the price an elected official can expect to pay off this national daisy chain.”



"Come, come, my fire engine, my end of the Chinese drill, no raccoons now.

What was the devil?

You wouldn't have sat in the real devil’s lap at the mall on end of sale days.”



"I had no eels with which to ram back your otter attack.” Tebald Greengill

Alcoa researcher had occasion to remark

”You are the only proof of your serpent charming license.”

See what your having friends has done?

“No donuts but you applied for a proving ground permit. By their thirst methods."

He was as thirsty as the day he was meant to have been born.



To be a paisley sacrifice, sister this and love thy that, all atheist biblical prating

and a tobacco pony reined to it.

The holders of the PO Box keys wherein the bombs were maintained at room temp

had made three milkshakes before noon of the day.

the mitigating circumstances drank too much sake in the sushi bar the night before

offending the none too goat friendly Panda keeper.

Would a pen full of lonely Panda and otter suspend convention?

You might if you had seen her.

The sight of her azure eyeshadow now brought it all back to him -

how he had coveted her catalog duds

and treasured the time she let him stroke her automatic elephant blunderbuss



whenever in the pen he thinks of his maximum penalty

he becomes sentimental

that shining moment he took the stage to present her to her party

and found the public attentive to her gun rack

regards it still as a present from the powers that fly in first that he himself was given

this singular honor, after he’d found the otters

had had another engagement and canceled with only a couple hours notice

She was wearing a dated dress he removed

with the crowd’s eyes as he entered her ahead of them.



"If," said Mr. De Volyooshun to a Gnome, "the deed to this hammered lid

was in fact the infamous overlook

it was only infamous in the sense that what is famous is fleeting

and what fleets fleets from a half steeped brain.

Its infamy is not in the Dillinger concealed in the wonder bra

but in how that fellow Marceau

was hardly a hymen.” The music of the death of pain got through.

And she looked surprisingly like an otter

in foam rubber runner up suit. An Oversight judges everywhere

will one day pay for.

The Sleep of the Just (Barely)

Now all the martyrs have been vanquished
who can we trust to translate a safe lunch
from the Mandarin? Is it a crazy ass chicken
scratch menu? Or an exquisite chronicle
of an ancient heartbreak? Is that even real
Amerikan Chinese? Where are all the funny
fuck ups that make the fire containable?

No one killed for justice in days. And yet
there is a school, the blackout windows
watch you waiting for a bus each morning.
Nature’s wondrous dance of watcher and bus
passenger freezing at the stop. The lateness
of conveyance again, value added continuity.
Muy Bueno. The lunge of the universe sings.

He gave himself an Oscar for his penultimate
orgasm but his speech exceeded the time limit.
The looming danger of too many essential people
to thank. Befriended by the very friendly deities
all acting together like a battery life. O, black
and uncharted errata, how convenient that you
can’t get anywhere from here.

The lurch forward of the stopping threw
the bodies back like a motorcade headshot.
Loud was the noise that was heard and aimed
the gazes of observers focusing on a pigeon
fight visible beyond the light-up destination
sign. These were among the inconsistencies
that made it a good day, but not in court.

Through the cyclone he lost none of his fat,
having studied the resiliency of the shithead.
He practiced imitating contracting stars, without
the concomitant fairytale emissions. Nothing of her
influence survived his scoliosis of the funnies.
That once self-described glib tongue already grafted
to a bone in the blistering end of the garden.


So how, again, was a martyr constructed?
It had to be according to some Chinese puzzle
where you line up the borrowed warheads. Not
without some help from the Self Inflicted Auto Dealers
Group. They use their children to annihilate your soul.
So says the broken cross to the shattered crucible
of Milwaukee’s Best, ignoring the irony.

Close your eyes. Visualize yourself on a beach
attempting to achieve an erection with the help
of only a single oyster cracker. You do not
feel salt in the breeze. You have no sense
but can say the words, “Remote” and “Safety”
into an empty chamber. You need more booyah
from your lack of prowess.

Let the inconsequence, of which that vast expanse
before your stitched lids is largely a familiar mower
path, bathe you gently in scalding tomato soup.
A bus-like military vehicle runs over you hourly.
Try to count backwards from one.
Pretend that a beautiful woman
can see you breathing.

They All Look Like Clerf Glock in the Dark

1.
Enjoy the feeling of the every day
and the doing of the thing
from time to time,
without surrendering
stress for the body and the mind
going haywire,
and a post-mortem look
at how well you achieved some sound
may be the easiest way
to pick up the check without paying
a portion of your heavenly wealth
or damaging your amplitude
as a status.

2.
Is it you or not you? She
wanders in at unhappy hour
lugging a dried up old typescript
of feathers, you, as angry as you
make the birds, forget the money
in so many frantic digits
it had gotten to the degree
where he made less than he owed
to me to tell him what not
to blow in his rent on.
he considered an equivalency
test in skiing. They shouted
and threw him down

the Matterhorn into Cervinia
like a human snowball, with thorns.
Joe Papoose and I agreed that
whatever that meant, say
a symbol for the collapse
of the buffalo nickel
or driving too far to buy
a map, it could actually be
the state of the union
of these two pigs. Respect
the uniform, the rest will
come out, like pox,
against the whispering rocks.

Resist and risk a second season
of Surmiser: Israel.

How to Impress Your Girlfriend's Girlfriend

roll up every foot of sod in her lawn
and replace it with a copy
of a very incriminating self portrait

hang her image in effigy
and tour the installation around the world
in low rent exhibition spaces

pretend to think she was obtained at auction
in the seventeen hundreds
and converted to Wicca by the pious master

when the drone from desire
sounds like a recon probe from deep space
remind her of slaying cattle

make a champion of your spare components
set him adrift with his lances
let the prevailing wind foster a son in her

say she was possessed by evil
spirits, one unresolved, populate her dreams
with huge eyes, dark clouds

throw fragile hearts at her Jacob’s Step-stool
disrupt her sleep with bells
deface her windshield with seagulls

after the great depression
it’s said they built enormous underground bunkers
find one and reinstate prohibition there

A chance is all we’re asking

Returned Unopened For Refund

The man on the square with the tongue in his hand was versed in speech.

He said, “Hear bombers overhead, you sons of panic! Hear dumb noise
as a deafening threat to farming. Hear yourself not caring. Do nothing
but stand and yowl at your shadow until you hear from me!”

The cleaning crew came through and shoveled the crowns and scepters
into receptacles shaped like the testicles of partially paralyzed bowlers.

It was dismally gay and festive.

“Get your coat cleaned and burned, Lojack.” And he did and looked resplendent.
Indeed, the snake that bit him, as an example, ended up swearing off red meat.

a) The son fixed upon a point
b) The wrong body for the job
c) A man named Margaret convinced them
d) The scales were leaned on with intent

That quiz you just took was a joke.
He did not intend you to act in any particular way.
And so you acted in that way.
Having slain the duration of your day.

A mold of a hand is created every time a hand is raised above cruising altitude.
A fancy way of saying your special order vagina just came in.

The Option Before the Final Option

“There is a footnote in my mouth,
it tastes like I imagine a bee might”, said Andy.

Andy who has not appeared in these notes
in several years. He is laughing, knowing he’s won.

There are many names by which Andy is known.
An act that modifies an idea is one.

The spiders, the circuits, the loss of contact.
Andy prefers to be able to scold, and fortunetelling.

The crime of tents or a mass absence of interest,
Andy witnesses, in Minnesota.

The Klan was a state first, the moving trees
The state where Andy was hoping, but failed, to be born.

We’ve seen this before in that no man’s land
which is formed by Andy and his blackface orchestra.

And again, salt reappears until he dances. then the doctors
who cured Lincoln conquer Andy, a variant strain.

Andy destroys the shrine of a great albino lizard, and the tomb
of an unlisted saint. These towers meant nothing, less now.

Lone Comma

The poisoned thorn, that I picked it up
was the cause and beautiful outcome
predestined by the bus accident down the street?

I was not in the poem subsequently published
it was a sporting event, good for the racists it decried
the noise of the sobbing distracted the driver

pinned by metal inside, she tries to think
of pale blue sand beaches, a man with woman’s features
regrets never having sex with a geode, or hardly

Sgt. Condo who served in the War of the Moment
the man of her dreams, an invalid with pay
a tree opaque, the emergency door held shut by kids

I have still not entered the performance, I am reticent
retired without severance, bitter about the 401K
no more cameos, I record the movements, I record the movements

of dust, airborne skin, on wet paint
what can you say about death in yellow, slowly folding in
the inevitable decline of third season sitcom writing

to be is not the question to be concerned with, ameliorate
it’ll do you no good in the long run, arms flailing
a matted montage of you and your only remaining horse

and she was invalided by a scale
certain numbers have no purpose, i.e. 249, 263, etc.
the interest of scarabs in reducing themselves to talismans

we’re thinking of naming the girl Sahara
the other girl Gobi
and the boy a very foolish thought

the one with the powers could not be divined
she tried to paint the sunlight yellow
butter with bread as excess baggage

Gaarbo Sensed in a Lead Vessel

the printed work is a statement, we’re leaving for the country.

the printed work is staring at you, we’re leaving you for the country.

the printed work staring at the yellow wall, left in a country of stations.


princess of the static moment.

her entombment, reminiscent of the freezing cloak, skirt afire, armor placard.


the wolf and the coyote might work together to confuse you.

the world and the coin might devour each other and split the profit.

the wolf might use the coin to alter his features, the coyote suspects.

a world of nothing but existence is a lousy nightclub concept.

the internet has changed the wolf forever.


the incessant howling of the moon at something in costume.


the printed work is a fated task, fated never to be printed.

work is its own declining orbit, being made as an offering to a toolbox.

the agonized mothers looking up at their children arriving with arms and allergies.


the word is printed upon the life.

the brilliancy of the city demands a replacement world.

the wolf is a doorway into a showroom of bargain wolves.

All On a Broach

The pig has its own symbolic right to display a grammar.
That was his argument, a pinch on the ass, common sex replicas.
The critters that cooked up a speech then couldn’t deliver the goods.
In every argument down here someone comes away a socket lighter.
Glue down more kids, the wings are out of balance.

There's no point in my considering this sentence, no fragment in a green
enameled bomb purse. I have a question of great unimportance, my life
is living in a rented room in Astoria. At last, the idea of marriage.
A Texaco horse from the enemy, circa one million CG.
Your argument for extinction; flashy, cruel, succinct. Hands?

The move to the new headquarters was wise. That winged thing
would have found a way in. And there goes your ballgame.
And there it goes again. Busy, ballgames, aren’t they?
Why is the one headed this way packing an RPG?
I will attempt to engage it in casual banter. “Excuse me, Red…!”

And there is where the story chose to end.

He has been a bullet with similar characteristics.
Speaking of the cavalry charging up Calvary, kindly escort these ladies
to the clinic until the lovelier ones arrive.
We have some elbow grease to spend.
And that’s how the whole darn love thing got started!
There along the mighty, muddy love barrel, barely of age yet
consumptive and raped with promise.
The song goes just like this.

I am a delicious dying crustacean.
I can fly into walls at ground level.
It takes a crew this big to clean the world or double your cancer back.
Think he could tell that he wouldn’t see Cuba again?
To hear him tell it there is no magical bull.
And still he insists on mowing from the underside.
Says things are never the same as you make them.

In this light, the magic hour I’ve mentioned in my epitaph, you can see
but only for flashes, and only into the nearer of the futures.
A full sized, conscious doll with great legs.
New paint for the Statue of Literally.
Baseball with guns.

Tell that fucker, Wiggins, if he don’t stop making that clacking
all goddamn night he gonna get his punk ass kicked good.

Unless Rueluas L’Aventure shows up with the pigs, look for me
on the center cross. It’s my beast to be, now, he fell off and left.
I think he went thisaway, looking for something. A hat, maybe.

I awoke in a room in front of a picture window.
The window was this screen.
I forgot to tell you I’m writing this on this screen.
Are you reading it on anything?
The light of the forest when insomnia reigns?
The dark when everything closes its eyes?

The story appeared to have finished some time ago.

The day, however, looked full of promise.

Brought Up In a Curse the Glass Goes White To

whatever doesn’t make you stronger kills your desire for change from strangers.
which is the way to arrive at your destination without having to leave the tub?
you will keep longer if you don’t age, or age in the presence of ice sculpture.
images of cats in desperate peril work best.

land is also improved by age. some said the real picture was of her hand.
arrangements of disparate bodies that others with empty sheds might buy.
the word chalcedony is painted over each numeral of my watch.
a lover remaining at the window as the police arrive.

it seems unfair to charge twice as much when you only give half the volume.
but then, three prices for everything. the parrot is watching M.
a hand set free will do everything it can to return home with bacon.
he can, for you, be, perhaps, not much, too late, we’re closed.

a penny for your pretty good guess. less for the common plinth.
he seemed perfect until he spoke.
he appeared to accept us on our own imagined terms.
the animals, though, were very nervous.

They All Love My Baby

On those crutches you’re about a beauty.
About a circle, in a circle of crucifixes.

Gazes flexing at joints, at books of skin, sampling.
Abnormalities and deformities, a sylph smiles

from the Reichstag’s elaborate iron balcony.
The procedure wasn’t expected to be so lengthy.

An endless twilight crossing, wet joints, skin,
arthritic, huddled, cards in a heaving sampan.

She smiled is all that made the montage.
They thought they ought to have killed her then.

Might’ve done so, but the weapons were too soft.
And the fact that she had no money.

Some information was spilled, tour guides
know the spots, or bend them to vendors’ benefits.

Money, after all, has changed its perspective.
Forget that we had a kingdom, this man is not the king.

Several of the nobles still visit her body.
The caretaker’s buy-off varies by their horses.

Her crutch moves more freely now, forms
more inventive, elaborate shapes.

Like the outline of a drowning faun,
or the smiles of fever victims.

Cave if the Painting Suggests It

The great bank of fog on the wall
Turrets were where we first did it
Watching the cars directly below
And you buckled until the sun

Sgt. Presto was known worldwide
At the Paris Exhibition he danced
For the upper striations of geese
What’s good is not for you to speak to

Go sing to the nightingale on your thigh
Shall I drop the needle? We're shorthanded
Keep opening to the flinch lock, star spurts
And I will steal you away in cork raiment

It’s the same thickness you remember
Sparks still surround its reluctant launch
Swell of the straw, the gentlest wreck
When you recorded your mouth in context

A shell in the archive, annals of petal discourse
the hall, was it ever this narrow, as dark?
I think of the time she looked along the length
and found her way lit into the bluer passage.

The Footprints Against Your Plaster

Aline fell against the door jamb wistfully.
No. Dreamily. “You shall bend my name
Against this until it vanishes with me.”

The Sycamore fell so sweetly, so confidently.
Disease had not dulled its annoying beauty.
From the roof of your house you can see
The places neighbors hide their drug money.

This land ate Woody, and it will eat you.
Whose slave was it that said, “I’m pregnant
Master, what shall I put on the headstone?”

I see the same people at the Laundromat.
I must remember to ask them about their welfare.
There are things we all have in common, fear.
The new record by that French Canadian.

Once the question has been drafted, the ambulance
Channeled away with its bomb, time for a pick-me-up.
We will pose the question and strangle in decorative crepe.

You’ve known me for as long as it takes to drive
to the burger joint. I will be waiting for time to rethink
its take on this space I use for spare skins, replacement chins.

Is there an us I missed in the shuffle? The mad dash to close
Before closing time? Time for one more short set, one more round.
This one is dedicated to all the brave soldiers defending our way
Of life in the wine cellar. It’s called “Unreachable by Sonance”

My son is a germ in a pocket math capsule. He merges,
Fabricates shapes, makes shoes for the poor, eats gluons.
A son is a wonderful thing for a man to emulate. Compact.

I find that lately I am able to reverse my epidermal order.
And often the effect is striking. I hope for my children’s sake
That I die with the secret intact. There is little more
comical than a sudden deathbed objection.

The sun seemed sudden at first, remember?
I saw it from a small hill bent against my only word.
But she happened to be the girl the grass demanded.

You Have No New Messages and They Are All Marked Urgent

After the Pentecostal basement riots

a certain asthmatic might find himself

Who has the power he asks in this red vault hole

to hold fast an unnatural parchment climax?

Might just wash a rope for the kick, the trapdoor

just as well a host piano ridden of its peckers

Protonutcase protected by a corps of generals

singing their favorite shellacs, pantsing the cadets

I will you into a plexiglass castanet, headache hour

the regenerative power is abstruse, obtuse, connubial

Roots of the world, retire to your balloon shorts

On pain of deathless preciousness, side realities

held in external escrow at the edge of a strawberry

Injury, my fellow, my compadre, may you never be

farther than Pluto when I dream of beatings shared

Pluto the reductive dogstar, the thing the emperor

(or was it the furniture king?) swapped his clothes for

Hirohito might have said it better, had this been a movie

of Bogart’s rattle

But I am he of your most ferocious tenting

snapshot, your whipsnake, the wagon latch that dropped

a door on your holy uptake, your penetration west

Cardinal Rivulet spat at the cancer swallows

And that’s how a tinstar melody is born

Or a tarbrush given to the feathered creatures

Expectation is a horrible thing to remove from its dome

That which he most feared was smoke damage to his clothes

He carried destruction in a billfold of human pelts

When they fucked I sang and walls of paper expanded

I shall today send to the bell for confirmation, that car

And how her nipple was worshipped by the hobbits

Where the feet of The Somme still patrol sharpened logs, taunting

And Cambodian keychains present you at Oedipal court

Yudhisthira has left the building, before it was built, burning cold

and left us alone, the countess, my Psyche, myself and la maid

Countless? Turn that hand over to me, we’ll roll it back to ‘73

With the dexterity of a body, a radical free foundling

lost in a muffler slide

Mermaid Sallies

1.

"God bells to you, Al."
He had barely said it
when The Wonder! occurred.

So much sympathy and anger in Saint
Louis. And a tone of mind
control in every comedy.

At least it’s over for the night.
A pin prick during the act.
Is it over for the night?

2.

he made his living collecting the huge
the first was a monolith butterfly
rarer than a tree
larger than a stack of Pontiac retirees

second was a train constructed by ants
of the main roads none are open
for the tales to be true a hat is required
they tell of him and the roundness of his arms.

3.

He remembered, too, how sweltering
it had been in the bedroom during
the secret.
Had smelled the weakness and her
support and the very specific threat
that made him come
for supper. Be eyeful, she lip-synced.
Laid on the wedding-clothes, waiting.
He jotted something
in a pocket dictionary. Pushed back
his feet from the stone enclosure.
The lights cancelled.

4.

"And so you know pain now, my fridge?"

Her face was stapled
and filed to a whisker.

Celinka et Giustino

hav youe rascales tyed hys ympermanence toe yone soure oraynge treye?
ae cartelle ownes thee ryghtes toe thee pureye settyng one youre blendere
ande collectse everye tyme youe mayke ae smoothye. hye ysn’t halfe ase goode
ate sermonyzyng one comedye typped barbes. Buttere ande egges
ande Frenche jokese ande finallye juste shute upe. thanke youe
fore thee use ofe thee trye-cornere hate ande cooeyng ine mye eare.

ande coconute. ande compleyte unexpurgatede calendarse
ofe ympossyblye syllye essentyale shyt. ae showe ofe cosynes
undere thee needyle hedge juste looke lyke ae lotte ofe absurde
numberes. ydyote veneratyones ofe thee bryttle, thee olde.

youre eyese hade eyese onyce, ande cupes enoughe toe appeayse
theme. nowe youe ayre lyttele moyre thane ae cayse ofe thee clappynge.
thee sune shunes youe. ande whene alle yse sayde, Ye ame noe longere
ae lottoe tyckete, ae mane ofe smalle ygnorable actse. Ye ame beycome coyne.
Ye haven'te thee tyme toe complete thyse ryme fore youre blynde schoole.

It’s all so very eighties. Rigged and netted before the books see print.
Played out in France where they don’t care where it comes from so long as it eats
like cheese. But the sovereignty of the puddle is unsullied.

Find a looking glass, look for the parasite, define the lines between ovaries and jackals.
This story is your own. Take it to the beach and show it the sun expanding.
Show it the tide confused by daylight savings.
Give a quarter to someone who doesn’t look needy.
Jump up into low orbit and hold your breath until help arrives.
Find this note and describe the bottle to the police sketch artist.

thyse ys thee houre ofe youre awakenynge, thene youe peryshe beyfore havynge solde thee secrete. Ye shalle halve ae goode laughe ate youre expense, thanke youe.
“yte yse thee felycytye toe shute upe whene one fyre, thee patyence toe wayte fore youre turne toe speake thate wylle ultymatelye showere prayse ande fonde poete morteme vytryole upone youe."

hyse coate wase ae longe blacke webe ofe vowelse. rentede acrosse thee streete frome thee strype clube oute ofe thee backe ofe ae layte modele vane. hys necke revealede the scares ofe ae faylede judgmente. thee clothe ofe thee shyrte collare hade beene torne ase yfe bye laughtere. ande thee rufflese ayte hyse throate.