[SIDE-A]

                                                                   1.

Hell slap it into them. And not without a fury. Right inside
the delicious caption wherein the snail has captured our confidence
as he himself confides to a hedgehog
about his own classified bones, a creature that as he floats mid-

sentence, we sometimes will misidentify if not mistreat,
mistreat like a paper clip bent out of shape or the hovercraft
that, with its projection of blue beams, might as well have taken

one of us up through the central hole of (yes) its toilet.
Yes, they’ll blame it on too much Jim Beam
after handing you a couple orange Tic-Tacs,
while, now, we play another game of paper, rock, scissors,

and try not to confide about those grenades of grim flash-backs,
which still haunt us.
Either way it might have been for five minutes or four hours

when we consider the time for which...

I had had nothing in my life to do
with the horse that, despite the painful lack
of any wide-open pasture to stray
the black and tan patches of her hide

nonetheless stood beneath the quiet chalk-
board of night on which only the clipped nail
of the moon hung. Beside the kitchen window,
hours of a vague sadness fell to the graveside

As I watched with holy astonishment
her graze over flowerbed stalks that,
in the half-burnt drag of my nightly stupor,

glowed like a mixed bag of potions to mask
the injustice of my life, its blank terms
of possibility for which, from the other side

the exile speaks with such joy, such sadness.

Like the Roman General Regulus nailed shut
into a barrel with a tendency to rust
as it bobs like an Apollonian vase
over the broken pier glass of some falls,

observe how often you duck and (yes) flinch
inside the rattle
in which like a house finch
you mostly yawn and bleed for lack

of any breathing space.

Why it is, as your little yellow submarine
strolls past the sawdust
of yet another blue-ridge farm,

you pine for one last picnic beneath the bust
and (mot juste) all-embracing pall
of the Little Red Light House

that keeps the faint aura of hope from being completely doused

by the rapid at hand and those still looming in the cards
as you fail to nail down how exactly the snare
in a snare drum first produces a thump
before the pale jar

that, beneath the river roar,
ultimately sounds for
the thud of breaking apart.

What is the point of lying
unknown in an ex-
hausted bed when the
insane clocks whisper

softly to the graveyard’s shovel
to “go eat a carrot”
for the graveyard shift

and Cupid in his cloud runs
on everywhere ,
deaf to our sparrow prayers.
What am I going to do

with tomorrow eating
a peach again?
Suffer punishment

under the wide afternoon’s loaded gun
where the trees are a dove’s quiet grey.

Thanked be fortune, it hath been otherwise, [&] twenty times better–Sir Thomas Wyatt

‘The flight to recover what has been lost
and found and then lost again & yet again*,’
the bastard son of the Aristocrat
spoke with a breath of anguish and potency
that, dealt in the unreasonable mil-
dew of its entirety, signified
nothing more than–in his penguin black tie
and white suit, his yellow gloves and western
stirrups–he was quite mad where, parked beneath
the curb, outside the coffee bar from which,
more than once, he’d been banished, the bastard
son sat wrinkled and slumped, looking quite dis-
stant, disheveled on the skeleton of a black umbrella,
his only consolation from the cold,
hard pavement that was his Dear Mother Earth.

On the day in question, I showed up for a hot
drip of coffee and slice of pumpkin pie.
When I first passed he was wearing one boot
and talking to a branch...

There will be no pity, no ruth, no solace for the sweltering
caravan of months
that, there again, Mr. Monster, Little Cracker Boy, Lysus
Naturae, you will miscount for the few pink slips

of weeks–where beneath some crooked Lullaby’s sway,
on a thick
carpet cut of red
melton cloth, you sat in a defensive crouch

& so did your stolid best
to brace for the torpedoing drumroll
of curtain-falls as they might have fallen

upon stage to your own troubles–what now counts
for a never-
ending spool of invent-me-nots.

2

At first the orchestra warming up, playing a soft spring
rain of scales
as the Devil takes stage, licking
a few houseflies off his buttery waffle cone of cream.

The dripping pink-rosé to orange-sorbet peeling
off his satin cuff
like the vulchered-[sic]
dawn-til-dusk of Hiroshima.

3

I think of Leibniz’s We should not have to break our heads,
break our heads as much as is...

Once, in Washington Heights as my thoughts were being drawn
Through a symphony of glass and, there within, sucked into ac-

celerating particles and jots of time itself, seconds stained with
The yellow to violet avenues of dusk, I came to grief or, as some

Might say, terms while crossing High Bridge with the voice that
Later would confirm my diagnosis ‘that there was no voice and

Then the one which would multiply and drift,’ come to think of it
Drift like a Chinese lamp or beacon of smoke, telling me something,

Whispering any given conspiracy, knowing I carried the gene and
Would believe anything it spoke; the cruelest utterance burning

My hair, burning my eyes as if I were the one who volunteered for
This vehemence, lifetimes ago; to travel, night and day, on this immense

Journey for which, over blank stretches of no, no, no; it serves me right.

The days became hours while the hours
became days wherein the seconds fell not
As grain but the drifting snows that now kissed
the spangled stripes of the General’s mute

wizened air. O!–how he had most suffered
through the pierced months of steady retreats
and deafening betrayals that had brought
Hell’s tremendous chords and early flowers,

that now merely defined the red renown
of what might have been his stiff company’s
finest hour. The General sat on
the broken bell to a smoldering tower

where somehow he felt he had sunk to the
bloody trunk of the sea, like a great statue
held by the solace of the sky-wide water, becoming
the silence of what never would be seen.

The hammer rested against the nail–still as a coffin lid,
High in the barn rafters
Where I listened to the trees
While, in hand, my mother’s mirror blinked.

A toy soldier held guard, trembling
Over the few stray bullets
That had settled like slugs
On my Grandfather’s workbench.

Next to the broken shower head,
The head of a deer sat dead as a prophet
Or trophy among the steam,
Upon a nearly restored church pew,

Offering me a glimpse of life after death,
Or what it might mean
To be born again–stripped
From the flesh.

Atop Aunt Eunice’s crate of pickle jars
The scratched vinyl record skipped
With the mellifluous voice of the Rev. Billy Graham
Begging to be turned off, or atleast flipped over

To the other side.

There I am—the reflection of ten frozen flies armed to the teeth.
Seven broken kites tied to the shadow of a Gypsy, blazing
A sooty crumb trail of thumbprints and fingernails
Through a field of crop dust & snow–towards a stockpile of dirt
Where the constable always catches me
Kissing the grubby lips of a toad, skipping my dead sister’s rope.