Stiffened by the very day which scratched off
A two-hundred foot ditch
That holds back the Eiger’s five-
Thousand foot wall by which a rock god
Still’s gaining traction

with a clink & a clink & a clickety click

As he links up like The Legend of Zelda
Into the penultimate A5 pitch,
Running out the length of a blind man’s bar tab
With the hope of, at last, breaking past
The fringe that, beyond the grave

Of my mouth, I can taste with a lick & a lick
& a lickety lick
Off this rusty icepick.

Out from beneath the red eye of some whirlwind’s squall
Of (yes) dandelions and ballerinas,
I found myself, yet again,
Cracked bright by that religious instant

If not needled out of the sunlight’s squint–spit quite
Beyond the semblance
Of a pink trailer park, and into the pro-
Longed scatter

Of North Carolina’s holy beige countryside
Wherein both the crows
And panther-spotted cows bathed
In the scent of either silence or paralysis,

Gazing up at some packrats living it up
In the few tall rain clds making for the sky’s
screen saver as I grazed past the dark side
Of distance, waiting for the return of Mr. Thoth.

Chapters of my life.
I watch them pass as leaves break
Through the avenues of wind
That wash over the Harlem.

Who are you that have extinguished the light
Of what I have come to seek?
Heat collects on the wasted vines
of the wild grape, which weave

Throughout the hourglass of High Bridge Park,
Binding the days that the Trickster terms night.
Gently the moon sways pink
Over the termless roots that the Coons clutch

In their two-step across the tight ropes of Elm trees.
Down is the new up wherein the Owl is not. Is not

what it seems; Death, your eyelids do not phase me.

   Between some freshly-laid piss
   and vomit from some 'china girl'
   or 'odradek,' he collapses or more 

   accurately 'subsides' after tracing 
   a penta-grammed ridgeline 
   of ashes and stardust; right off 
   the porcelain lid, shattering Corporal 

   Clegg's floccinaucinihilipilification-
   nous wooden leg.  Off the bath-
   room floor, 
   Boswell hums the abysmal 

   name of the rose, and begins 
   to confess to 'swallowing 
   a bomb' 
   inside *The Bahnhof Zoo*, 

   the yellow to orange submarine 
   in which Boswell mindfully lifts 
   out from the fog of some unspeakable 
   trance, 

   at the bottom of the sea, ribbiting like a bullfrog 
   next to Aleister Crowley, atop a blue whale's stiff corse.  

Just a few months after Cathy Earnshaw kindly
drove Heathcliff ‘mad-
ly off,’

begging him to ‘just go’ and ‘rob a gold mine!,’

Heathcliff returns years in advance–not simply as
a thief or some pale white gypsy chewing
the leathery meat of a vulture–

but ‘an actual fiend’ out of an old Edwardian novel.

Francis bites into his light-brown Virginian cigar
and begins to tip-toe like our real Byronic
hero, stumbling ever so blindly down the tempestuous

halls and narrowing passages of Wuthering Heights.

When the Viennese police show up, they’ll find f. scott
ever so windingly in search
for a light as he mumbles out a few slippery slurs

about ‘actually being invited to this stupid party!’

From the opening organ bass vamp
of ‘So What’
to ‘Blue in Green’ and its muted
kind of squill

scribbling out from one of Miles’
crumpled posthorns
and back into the 1 train’s third rail–

His paddleless train of thought
meanwhile drifts further
out to sea.

Like a kickdrum tugging itself
out of steam,
deeper into the palm
of the ocean’s quiet swell.

On the very same day,
at the exact same time,
out of the bay blue sky…
on the same pink corner

Bely’s frayed nerves blinker
until they blinker out
into an inaudible symphony

wherein Erik Satie cobbles
Bach back to life
and just as

Cervantes falls off
his voluble brown
horse–like Pythagoras

on his ass, to observe ‘the…the minor
harmony and clash of the spheres.’

The rotten tooth and drooling tongue
of the unspeakable
right-foot-knot-
knowing-what-the-left-does

for which Ludwig’s eyes barely can clap
as the worlds of Milton and Borges
walk away. For two days, he’s sat lost
over a rickety table, with only a well

of squid ink and what seems a porcupine’s quill,
squibbling ‘mad spherical cows,’ or whatever’s

the case at foot or hand
to the disputed sphere
of language through which
his Tractatus draws

to a stop, the way a wound unheeled might
stitch itself to a close but only by leaving a scar.

It seems their dream
is not all dream
but, too far off,
quite Satanic.

In a flat just east
of Williamsburg,
Southey wakes
two-hundred years

beyond his initial scheme
for rule by all,
pierced by the scream

of Coleridge’s carbon-
monoxide alarm
which they’ll take turns

socking with a hammer until, drained
of all battery, they’re both madder red.

The beehive in which his peace
of mind hides
its bladeless turbine
as if not to be disturbed
by the world’s greater flux

hangs by a swollen branch
which, from the inside,
has already soured,

so that what’s most likely to set off
if not summon
Nikola’s last holy swarm of ideas
conjuring some ray of death

is not Edison’s sweet tooth or Marconi’s grubby paw,
but this squirrel’s sudden sway in its scrabble for nuts.