The whole Island of Italy had set
out to write me poems of tragedy
& reversals of fortune, not one which
was worth reading in the lowest wreckage
or highest reach of my despondency.

I stomped on my golden cape and tore off
my salt-rusted crown, and ludicrously
wept into the Caspian Sea, praying
for an unfathomable act of cruel,
natural disaster that the gods might

deliver. Surely, my roughshod partition
required, had had to come with some type
of contract for me to shoehorn or, atleast,
scribble upon in this time of ruin,

but nay, nay!– … only this unfortunate for-
tune broken from the nautilus shell of a cookie:
Concerning how much your rucksack shall weigh, measure the weight of
A camel dragging a sandcastle of bricks by his tail, into the world beneath.

The imponderous, penny-pinching language
of the portables,
los bachelor machines: and their impolite,
feather-light femme fatales,

who in that circumbendibus, orphic sufferance
of the risorgimento, exclaim Logic’s Hell,
reaming out Ra’s blistering ripened crops of rain

for the deep sibylline that floats, just out
of reach in the [sic] tintamarre and tumult
that still leaves us, in a paladin’s suit
of armor, to wonder if an aircraft coasting

towards a cheap cloudbank of mostly blindness
might vanish with the single, quicksand snap
of a tribesman’s right thumb and middle finger.

Stick it in the safe!–
That much I get,
seeing how my life
has become an empty
boat tied to the bank.

A river always leads
to an uninhabitable place–
A palace; some of then yellow,
some of them red
with a few gold nuggets.

He promised to select
the one marigold on the margins
of an empty hallway,
below that staircase
that no one can’t imagine.

                     2.

A trap door is only a trap
door if you don’t know
where to place it.

Otherwise, it’s a Lincoln-log
ride on which you throw up

your funnel cake.
From the factory bleachers,
Balloons of bleach
take out a table of paper cups
& plastic plates, where the high-

school mascot nods off the latest cure
from the pharmacy, begging
for a slap. Meanwhile, I remain
unreal from where the buck-
teeth of my enemies haplessly

endure, reduced by paper-
clips to splinters and tooth-
picks, which I, mercifully,
will shove up...

The appetites of seven heroes splayed, dis-
emboweled in a last, eighth fit of agony.

Girls, crippled by wounds, spit blood
upon the ground’s swell of arms, legs,

and the breast-stained brains of dead villagers.
Candide watched a monkey skip rope

between two talking heads of the old guard,
whistling his thoughts for a whole hour’s acreage,

appealing for alms, or to be sent to a reformatory.
The minister’s wife peered from the hourglass’ window,

letting down three golden vines of her persian silk-
sudden hair. Meanwhile, a beggar emptied his sores

over a pot of silver or gold–a creature without wings,
one leg but a soul. His eyes rotted out to the end

of his nose, that then brushed against his mouth
by which the creature proclaimed to be the sweet

age of sixteen and the daughter of the Pope […]
A vessel for the multitude, borrowed and broken

space-time from a pop-up...

The horse swallows a bee.
The elephant the retired rogue.
Down the cobble-stoned road
Back beyond the High Bridge docks,

Where the faint trace of sonicality
Wends out purple to blue flames
From Sonic the HedgeHog’s
Jumpman shoes. A sidewinder ride

Way ahead of its time
Of sunny damned delight.
The Circus of 1909,
Near the neck or nadir

Of Ft. George Park
Wherein the rusty tracks
Of space-time’s zip-drive
Loops down and back

To the new up again
And again, a spark
From sharpening
A Mason’s pocket knife

Sets off this powder keg
By which, limping up a little red
Light house, on Ishmael’s own
Peg leg, I free myself.

Exposed to the seizing against
the vice of seconds that grips
with the indifference of a wrench

I find the emergence of death-
in-this-life less disturbing,
an achievement of some short

distance. Here, in the inextricable
part of routine that rounds about
the clock that keeps my paycheck

just beneath a minimum wage
to live in a trailer park, next to
this pump station, where the

thought of pie cooling from
a neighbor’s kitchen window
supplies the itch without a rash

in the numbness of night’s limbs
quaking, nonetheless, in the blindness
of a storm’s asphalt heart shaking

any and all foundation left for me.

Obviously the analogy touches like a breeze,
sticks like a phantom while watching the moon
smiling. Imagine the other hand chopped off,

shivering on top of the sea, holding his pink-
painted pinkie finger according to the scheme.
Hence, the finite and infinite game cannot be

distinguished among pretty broken flowers
20 small beads and slabs piled in their heaps.
Analogously, the children of a certain tribe

learn the decimal system by counting beads.
In this life, as your world in its indefinite number
of instances comes crashing down, as death

in the incomplete language of grown-ups, begins
to drag open its door, only I really see what
I really mean by Obviously, the analogy touches

like a breeze.

To step outside of it is no more possible
than for a fish to walk on shore, and enter
The Flintstones. There is no other world,

besides the next rerun to carry your work
to a successful conclusion. Or Step by Step
to crown it all after a Full House with bases loaded.

It was the bottom of the 9th when the Big Bambino
stepped up to the plate, coughing up your exertions.
I could run with that. At this present moment, a palpable

Whack!–Pow!–Wham!–to the midsection.
Thank God It’s Friday, my Grandmother
on a Sunday replies from the nursing home.

There’s nothing to watch but idle curiosity
burying itself, and when, from the oval office,
we get an answer, the answer’s nothing more

than a joke as for why we’re here, turning the dials
on this ringing mechanism for Batman to answer
his phone. Then, of course, it’s best to run

from the telephone, before hearing a sound
of the coachman...

This planet is a grave.
The inveigled day a wrinkled band-aid
which, after a few bruised hours,

rubs off the wild strawberry patch
of your wound,
fading beneath the green
foam of the surf.

What’s there to realize, Milton? The surface
of Hell is a sizzling cunt and cold
to the brittle touch.

It was as if he was being externa11y cntrld, led by the vatic leash by which he was being dragged, more or less, like the maimed animal of a cruel god; dragged through some Keatsian Proverb into that psychic aether to happily serve God knows whom or what.

                                                          [^]

Again, perhaps it was God, Himself–who comes, who came like prana, that projected His only blue beam of life–so intense with the flow of RA–that it was almost viole[n]t. That sublime, religious pin-prick of the instant achieved, whereby his body & mind; Hell, even his very soul felt as powerless as a go[L]dfish in a ma1nourished bowl of miso soup & backwash.

                                                           [^]

That was the fucked-up score conducted by Beethoven or Bach, an 11th symphony, all the while, hidden in the yellow pages for a century on end. The...