Misfortune followed misfortune. Childhood
Grew tuneless. The gentle springs & bubbling
Brooks found they could no longer hum
For which the wolf and owl howled deep
Into the noon-tide of the sun, misplacing
The day for night. For 7 years, the perfectly
Full moon did not return. Where the sun had
Failed to sail the weight of the world right-round,
The wind lost first her voice, then all her songs.
School auditoriums and courthouse halls
Ticked counter-clockwise like a soldier who
Marches up the hill for a battering.
School boys stopped flipping their caps backward,
Wearing instead habits of priests and monks.
But there would be no sanctuary to
find, no orderly line of salvation
To follow readily. Their scroll-book of sin(s)
Would be more than any Hollywood set
Or Silver scene could possibly picture
Where the Lion roamed and slept among deserted
Grains of time, with 100...

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely than Death’s termless shade
and Zephyros’ most balmy gust: on the dark
page of gloom, it’s no misfortune to walk–

as with two Kangaroo Hops, I make up
the distance of Central Park. North-bound to
Harlem, which is Hell when Heaven it’s not.
Armstrong wanted to say “That’s one small step

for a man”, but the “a”, not audible, is lost
in transmission, captured by aliens–
those punk reptilians and greys that go BOO!–

when the Military Industrial Complex goes Boom!–
dressing up as Mickey and Minnie Mouse
to abduct Marilyn Monroe at the White House

Thou art more lovely than in God we Trust.

The elongated skull of a Dr. Jekyll
Had fallen into the improbable
Hands of a Mr. Edgar Allan Poe
Who, riding clippity-clop on an ox-
Hyde saddle, had rigged by satchel
Henry’s unreliable scalp to the haft
Of the Camel on which this tar-mad crow
Would make his row North by South
Or, out of the blue, the other way ‘round
To quench some strange, unforeseen star-

bound thirst

Boswell stews atop an overturned pi-
rogue that he dugout of a storage pit

steaming like the holy host of the ass-
embly line’s stash of copper sprags and brass

pinions, stainless spur-wheels, and tin sprockets
all put together wrong like a backwards rocket,

spouting of battles and penny-dreadful wounds
that, by the gash in his gown, advanced the detuned

clue that would carve out to the runed idea
that not one platoon but a whole battalion

of German Guards were, for his own hoopla,
conducting a little exercise through the air

when, in fact, Boswell was wholly unconnected,
and having a bad fright in the cathouse

of the Night’s terror, laying in dire-
ful apprehension that my testicle,

which formerly had been ill,
was again swelled [against all

luck] for as Douglas stood by me and said
“This […] damned and difficult case.”

How do we get off the eye-glazed treadmill
of decay? In lieu of titty-showers and ta-
rantula breath, keep the change you filthy

But I won’t go there. The nosebleed carriage
of the Wonder Wheel. At Midnight it dawns.
Bring a pumpkin that we’ll drop & watch smash

on one of those Russian spooks who go hunting
for sea-turtles on Brighton Beach. How about
that? Trained beasts without harness buckles

the planet has thus far borne under force
of glaciers with no possibility of sound.
The ruin of a titanic race. Once long shrunk.

From this height? No life through a mirror.
Limp, even brief arctic flowers dwindle–
from our bare dreams, trapped abruptions

on growths, ulcers, broken-heart disease, vari-
cose veins and other malignant deficiencies.
Inenarrable Indian sign n syn hex. hoodoo,

whammy, JINX to INDICATE. Point. Hint. Imply.
Suggest; announce, bespeak the telltale...

A folk tale of rook-pecked corpses and rusty bicycles
For which the pink elastic strings of the fable’s bikini
Has been washed too many times Like laying
A flaming palm branch of donkey shit at your door

After S– stood you up twice for coffee and struck
That match which lit your brain afire Again AMOK
In a clay hole surrounded by mortar rounds and
two broken vending machines with the image of POTUS

45 We’re in the Mental Block of the Hospital where
Everything’s REAL and prepped for the Furnace
With a bottle of opiates and 22 ½ gray pairs of socks

Just don’t play the role of the psycho (but claim your
Grandmother’s dementia) when the male nurse’s finger
Turns into a blade to get rid of humpty dumpty & your vertigo

At a modest 1,500 feet
out of his RAF Hawker Typhoon,
Warrant Officer George Martin
chews all the fat he might chew

then spits out the bone
before coming to grief,
considering how he
might bang out of his

cabbage suit and bale
from beneath the Nazi-
occupied sky, praying,
atleast, below the German

beehive for a baleful biscuit*
or bale of straw on which
this erk might crash land,
instead of how he would end

up breaking his leg against a pear
tree’s stolid peg
for a branch–where by break
of dawn he would be espied,

if not revealed, by the village priest
of St Pierre des Ifs, a man of facts,
who, knowing a thing or two
about screensavers, would pin

the british clot within a cell dank
if not dark enough for such a peeping
tortoise** to salt if not plug away and lick
his wounds by dint of a farmer’s barn.

By dint of a farmer’s barn in which Martin
might have, at...

I will walk in a city. I will walk
In a city Over & over Over
The course of 7 months, each day
Feeling the inner warmth of pain
As it breaks the ice of every muscle

Walking through photographs and notes
Of Doc Holliday, Bill and Grat Dalton,
The ochre notebooks
Of Paul Klee and whomever
Else I either cannot name or face

I will walk in a city. I will walk
Over & over the course of 7 months
In a single day Alone Feeling
The ache of every muscle
As I carry a half-emptied can of lead paint

From which my blood will trickle and rain
Down towards the bluebells of my grave

When did you stop to answer
The echo of her heart
When did you let the cankered root
Of her name rip like a rotten tooth
That you chained to a piece of floss–

As once you listened for the faint shadow
Or rumor of voice to step from some fairytale
Into the low tide of night like the daughter
Of Death, to steal your sad tooth, leaving
Her token of copper or brass for you to spend

Too fast The moment she shut the door
And you took that first infant step to no place
Two flights down without end–no moment
For beginning to wait and not believe
But, feeling her shadow pulse through your

Bones, know the door to what you used
To call home would never shut on you again

Passing through the life sentence of another’s pain
He must have arrived beneath the old-growth pegs
Of where the Hawk hangs, having stumbled then
Faltered under the distance of her wings

He must have arrived at the other’s words
As the warden’s sword drew out into the distance
and the firing squad for the deaf and blind squeezed
their triggers, drawing blank looks of flung grimace

as 12 words, for pain or patience, punctured the flesh-
white blankness of this child chained to the charge
of a Minister’s command, his desire sinking into the mix-
ture of charcoal and sand that allows the miles to vanish

the years to depart as the first summer storm rains down