Because I find it hard
to let go

of the old, burned-out avenues
I have already extinguished–

where these stitches seem to crawl
and the dumb thermometer

hangs from your mouth
for all the rage inside you.

It’s not so bad–
the poem emerges:

here, alive, my Love
like a dirty, wingless knuckle

out of an egg–
covered with footsteps.

It is all that is
inside you.

Heretofore tell how in grief
The balloons went up,
The roses opened,
The prophet’s eye shut,
How before daybreak
The light unleashed,
Entered the quill,
Wanting to write of where
The river went out of shadows
And so touched
The high note that calls
The dead wick of Ra’s
Hidden word that opens
To the end of times.

Behind the closed eye to one door
The poet sits on a park bench
Beneath the breath of heaven
In a dreadful wake of sleep

Knitting his new suit of wing
Like a minister before an altarpiece
He has been at it (this miracle?)
For several weeks, at risk of being

Overtaken by his own hydra
(why call it curse?) of toil
Bound to the heroic bullring

Of lousy revolt, to his memory’s
Huge bulk, which still beats
For knowledge of the highest candle.

What a fucked-up night
it was to be at the fair,
walking the Mayor’s dog
with six extra legs through

the muck: that’s how I feel
now when opportunity knocks
and I go falling down the stairs,
halfway into the impenatrable.

Yes, indubitably, it’s a problem
I have: lost years, periods
of silence full of rocks,

aging like old bread crust
to be carried off through
some hole by Mickey Mouse

and after three days
into Cinderella’s story.

Slowly, all your secret(s)
walk up to the piano
like stray dogs to play
this sandlot of lost puddles,

whistling goats
where no waterfalls
come to mind.
Steadily, the rainbow

drowns in water, the drug(s) wear off,
the grief of someone’s laughter
falls from a window, empty as bricks.

Tomorrow? Maybe, I’ll be flying,
sitting in a highchair
beneath the same stars.

Had I been crushed by existence
Thinking steadily of the great secret
(Was it really just a key?) buried someplace

(dim Kansas) within a little Gordian plot
Where the Lamb of Lords will take his leave
Of absence down a narrow street after a rooster

With its head Chopped off?
The world is disappearing
Death is holding its breath
Opening its greatest umbrella

Go ahead, you on my crutches
Step out from behind the curtain
With a radio gasping in your mouth
Once more, I will try not to laugh

It is Helms, die anderen Helme, that things happen to.
I schlepp through Boca Raton–perhaps mechanically;
like a rat–then freeze to peek at the sun; rumor of Helms
arrives by mail, or I spot his title on some drifting list of
derelicts and [sic] undependables. My own appetence,
hunger, appetite (why should we call it lust?) gallops to-
wards deserts of the West, shabby ruins, trophies full of
holes, the maps of beggars, the scrapped papers of my
lost and doomed forebears who have already been de-
livered to the perverse asperity of winter’s sun. The other
Helms shares my weaknesses, but in a proud, overweening
way that alters their bitten roots, gnawed realities, torn souls
into the trappings of a pantomimist, soubrette, or barnstormer.
While I grant that Helms has written a fine sum of sturdy
pages, those pages will not redeem me, perhaps because
the sterling in them no...

1. This mask is an old one.
2. The fatalities of its essence are not to be disencumbered
from certain casualties with regard to the faces it buries.
3. The faces–whether of pope, king, insolvent, beggar–become
dense, despondent, opaque… complex; a miserable sepia screen
of either real or ostensible anguish.
4. A real or ostensible anguish for which the bearer(s) of the mask
turn (through their hapless speech, by their countless acts, which
will not be mentioned here) into babbling infants.
5. Right now, as this ink dries, I rock in my cradle, burned by fever,
exposed to the moon; a moribund, senseless hoodlum.
6. Yes!–I lie on my back, the food of elephants.

“Was that life?”–I wanted to say to Death,
but Death had fallen down as one dead

and long remained like one dead on depar-
ture’s shore. For several days, the waves

crashed over, the lightning battered Death’s
serpentine bones. On the eighth day

the brown recluse of his suitcase washed ashore.
As if alive, trembling deeply with desperate sighs

that longed to be freed, I took Death’s scythe
and, with one fortuitous stroke, broke open

the lock. Inside, beneath layers of dust, of thorns,
lay Death’s whistle, Death’s hourglass. The first

Apple that the first worm had gnawed through
and then throughout Eden for Death to be born.

I stole a bite and with such bite Death’s whistle
screeched, his hourglass spilled broken; its grains

of time (sprouting legs) stretched into tarantulas
and, further, crawled up my skin, entered my mouth.

Like a child, I put on Death’s pants...

A fat man in the White House
Always lies; day and night.
You may have heard him. (Blowing snot.)
Maskless and sick, his notice sudden drips

As his speech divides like dynamite.
Yeah, during debate, his spotted dick seen–
Still he dreams of the Nobel Prize, then dribbles farther
On your Twitter Feed–like a Slug ‘til Kingdom cums.

Want more?–he counts on rednecks dressed in sheets,
Whores to shuck his corn.
Yes, he cums like a spoiled child with venereal disease–

As orange as the sun! For Nirvana, he injects bleach
Then posts to his apologists about its benefits like Vitamin C.
O Say Cannot You See!–he’s up before dawn, reading Mein Kampf

Then it’s back to Air Force-1 to give another rally, another speech:
Let’s Make America Dumb!–4 More Years, Let’s Make America Dumb!