What may be deciphered from a crack-pot piper
With his father’s right, cherry-red boxing glove
Caught cold raw to jawline of his own puppet-
like dome, the waster delivering as well taking
The dry Jekyll-to-Hyde punch, which turns his ex-
pression to Jell-O as he trips over eerie half
Of a tombstone–that while choking down a tiger
Orange to yellow flame of some fairytale’s angel
Dust. Yes. Some fairytale’s angel dust, after which
What may be deciphered from such a crackpot piper?
That like our many failed visions of God, each cipher
Breaks the jaw of our heaviest weight. Amen. Amen.
We might never come clear to be sure and of course
We’ll surely have to settle for whatever is next to fold
Itself out as the tongue of a prophet that today will be
Labeled just another pistachio nut reading in baritone
From papyrus scroll; from a cemetery’s pine-pulpit stump,
The fired pastor of brimstone...

The xylophone in the field of corn was just set down yesterday.
Crowds gathered on the road bank with their mobile phones
As if waiting for the scarecrow to play but his hands had been tied
And his thighs had left him like the cost of my honeymoon.

Eventually, after a couple of nights and days, a New York taxi
Drove over it with only the sound of a Manhattan speed bump
And no one by then was there to scream too loud and tell
The cabbie it was actually an illegal highbrow piece of art.

Back on Wall Street a hedge fund manager poked again
At his pet jellyfish to gather a spark of mania after giving
Up cocaine then proceeded with his wet dream of climbing
Everest or at least seeing Nepal through an oxygen tent.

He thought, ‘better than the framed nudes hanging in horrible Paris.’

Beneath the skyscraper where he works and huffingly lives
Coins were falling into a payphone
And with the...

In this moment I’ve woken up
Under a grey bridge in a white city
That I know is unknown to me.
The street littered with black cats
Because the storm is coming.

In an old album of a little boy who died long ago
The image of myself I saw in circus mirrors,
An abandoned drum left at the bottom
Of a rainbow and the holy Knights’ bones

That have fallen from the Castle of the Last Souls,
The butterfly, her wings that blink and alight
In the back of my head and, on occasion,
Have made me look quite ridiculous.

There is one page that has been torn out
And it is the smile of my soul
With an ashtray below her feature,
Exclaiming the famous songs of my genius.

Like remembrances of what is coming.
The boomerang is a faithful dog.
Those who see it coming like a half-
written page over the hope of the woods,

Will hit the floor. Sadly. With a religious beauty.
Begging for a little more from their negligible lives.

For Helen? The cosmetic sap conspired in the darkness,
The unsolvable light in the black-hole silence.
The migraine of summer was assigned to certain birds
And the appropriate calm to the inestimable
Mourning barge moving through currents
Of death’s love letters and dissolved perfumes.

For Helen?—after the time when the stonecutters’ wives
Whistled to the cascades in the smokey blue ruins of the forest.
After the time of stonecutters, the red bells of animals sounded
To the echo and cry of headlights in the valley & steeps.

From Helen’s childhood—the furs of shadows now tremble
For the breasts of beggars & vagabonds, their spiry tales
Of heaven. Her green eyes dance and sing to the canary
Mines and shafts of impossible light, to the impersonal waves
Of the satellite & stone beaming in for the disquiet of this moment.

I

Time passes, collecting speed
With the topspin of God
Then skates off the edge of space
Like a ping-pong ball.

‘Did he?, I mean ‘it’ mean to do that?’
Can we call God an ‘it.’
Some do but I rather
Would not.

The great mystery is playing the odds–
From down below and above,
At the same time,
Because—two places

At once, the great mystery is odd
And (Hell) invented it all.
And sometimes likes to boogie
In a dive bar, shifting the shape

Of itself, itself.

II

It’s like a sentence that runs on and on,
Changing subject, growing a beard
To cover his vagina, her balls—
Keeping pace with Forest Gump,

Its marathon for marathon’s sake
Across 50 shades of grey, of Amerika.

III

That’s what we paved
Over the land of the free,
The home of the slave,
50 shades of Iraq

50 shades of concrete-camouflage.

IV

The greyhound gallops
With the wheels of the bus
And the bogeyman
Opens its...

The waterfall resounds behind the comic opera to drown out her echoes.
The candelabra continues— with her several arms of Shiva—glaring into

The neighboring orchards and broken paths of the labyrinth
With the leafy blue-greens and molten reds of the sunset.

The leprechauns and spirits of Horace
Who delivered the First Empire by head-dress,–

Siberia’s dancers, all crossing out the thread-
work of Russia & into a painting by Boucher.
 

[from *Three Persons: Illuminations after Arthur Rimbaud]

I

As Fred writes, ‘the world will end tomorrow,’
The Earth tucks her balls and drops off
The diving board’s edge but then pops back up
Because it’s a ball of mostly trash and oxygen.

Walking around as penguins
After the end
We won’t remember
How to talk, how to fly

And will deserve it.
Wearing a tuxedo
And buck-naked
At the same time.

Haha!, God’s a bitch–

You drop off a melting glacier,
Try to cup your balls,
But your wings are a stitch
Too short.

AHHHH.

II

You open your mouth
But forget the words
Which were supposed
To roll out of it. ‘Apoca-

poca Poca’ is all that rolls
From your lips out.
Praise Allah,
Praise Buddah,

Praise John the Baptist,
Praise Jesus Christ
And whatever mutation
Of Bearer of Light–

Who took it too far
Into the red zone,
Or just sat down
Doing nothing at all.

III

‘I don’t know where I’m going with this’
Should be written in red
And snuck into the New...

A giraffe riding shottie in red Voltz Wagon Bug
would be captured so high above the concrete
camouflage of Interstate 95. Yes. Would be cap-
tured passing the blunt to none other than Oscar

the Grouch, who by steel wastebin top was in lack
of any brighter ideas, replacing both airbag and wheel
in attempt to steer? Yeah, Donald Trump–that might
have been the self-same, neon green-crack punch year

that I myself chopped all my bridges and just jumped ship.
Just to clear the air and perform my own very own mad-
hatted nut-cracker stunt–though the sea so many leagues
below the drift of any Ivy smelt not of seaweed but blacktop

and asphalt.

The very asphalt on which some lesson underground
might have been learned had I remembered, well,
after the ground stopped to swell, to remember. Hello, hello!,
Olé, olé!, and yeah, nebular is all that’s to be recalled

after your Blackbox has been...

L

Black eye of Robert Johnson’s Blues
Hair of Florida’s dusk and dawn
Bastard of no palace

No Lion Heart place
Though more charming
As he played Kermit the frog

Than North’s prince
From far
South fairy tale

Or Flemish tapestry
His crying lot
Of Unicorn

Of halite and emerald
Properties shelter
The strands The beaches

Christened by listless waves
With titles of Sparta
The Celts The Slavic.

At the wood’s singularity,–
The dream flowers burst
Illuminate,–the girl

Of black lips, her knees
Hexed through the knots
Of her elbows In the crystal

Flood rising up

Through fields
The naked goddess
Of Shadows cloaked

By the ocean
The Flowers
In Rainbows