FAMOUS POET after Ted Hughes

The day my book of poems set to print, the entire world
bought a red pack of Marlboros or put on their favorite
black lipstick. Some might have kissed their wives.
Then climbed into a hole without the dog, a couple
machines, a few wheelbarrows of matchbooks, sardines,

toilet paper.

Workers were striking from everywhere. Out of a job from a year ago,
I just continued to bang my hammer. The most compromised spread
widely about the streets. Then deleted themselves while most traffic
sped out from Mother Earth. And so we sat out on the stoop and licked
the rain in the gutter and thought of the color of Wednesday and of a life less confusing than from where we slept with our salty, quiet pillows,
waiting for this silent red spring. I wept into all of October and soaked.

Meanwhile, the yellow submarine did not emerge, the shepherd & his pie sat coolly like two widowed rats off the glint of the orange stove,
right as one of our satellites leaned out from where it hovered like a TicTac
set to crash in a billion years over Russia and thus we received the pitch
for how the runner was going to steal from 3rd or 2nd or was it 1st
before plucking the first chord. The whole stadium climbed to the rafters, taking their ‘of the moment’ sips from martini sodas. A football-

trophy wife wept silently into her cold macaroni salad and waited
to burst into one eternal plastic flame. In the beginning of the end,
it was the end of the dawn as the end neared sublimely without time
to begin with. Yeah. Grin. Remember the bloody miracle: it was I who,
just for a general kick of amusement or dab of experience, struck the match,

lit the chorus. ‘Where death blooms, will you breathe-in?’