Drugged and drowsy but not asleep
I heard my blind roommate's daughter
helping her with her meal:
“What's that? Squash?”
“No. It's spinach.”
Back from a brain-scan, she dozed
to the sound of the Soaps: adultery,
amnesia, shady business deals,
and long, white hospital halls....
No separation between life and art.
Beyond the strings of water
clinging to the windowpane,
there were no cranes, just rain,
a sky blurred by wet glass,
a pond corrugated by raindrops,
and, inside, the smell of naphthalene bars,
a Victrola with a broken arm,
a spotty daguerreotype, a dusty crinoline —
O mildewed, seersucker suits
draped over vacant chairs.
I was sitting in Old Town Square
with tourists and birds and I was reading
Foucault, how “he who is subjected
to a field of visibility... becomes
the principle of his own subjection”
and all around me the beautiful
Czechoslovakian boys moved through the first
day of spring like perennially
visible inmates in the opening credits
of a prison porno. The sun reflected off
the glass and my table was an inscrutable
tower of light from which I peered, invisibly,
at the swan-graceful boys who seemed to skirr
The bugle sounds the measured call to prayers,
The band starts bravely with a clarion hymn,
From every side, singly, in groups, in pairs,
Each to his kind of service comes to worship Him.
No, nor a fierce hurrah
for what it does without choice,
for following the light
for the same reason the light follows it.
Just a thing rough to the touch, a face
like a thousand ticks turning their backs,
suckling at something you can’ t see,
and a body like a tag off the earth
so that my child hands couldn’ t tear it out
from the overgrown lot next door.
My palms raw with the shock
of quills and spines. Its hold like spite, and ugly
Come To Sunny Prestatyn
Laughed the girl on the poster,
Kneeling up on the sand
In tautened white satin.
Behind her, a hunk of coast, a
Hotel with palms
Seemed to expand from her thighs and
Spread breast-lifting arms.
The lions who ate the Christians on the sands of the arena
By indulging native appetites played what has now been seen a
Not entirely negligible part
In consolidating at the very start
The position of the Early Christian Church.
Initiatory rites are always bloody
And the lions, it appears
From contemporary art, made a study
Of dyeing Coliseum sands a ruddy
Liturgically sacrificial hue
And if the Christians felt a little blue —
Well people being eaten often do.
There is a drear and lonely tract of hell
From all the common gloom removed afar:
A flat, sad land it is, where shadows are,
Whose lorn estate my verse may never tell.
I walked among them and I knew them well:
Men I had slandered on life's little star
For churls and sluggards; and I knew the scar
Upon their brows of woe ineffable.
Surfaces serve
their own purposes,
strive to remain
constant (all lives
want that). There is
a skin, not just on
peaches but on oceans
(note the telltale
slough of foam on beaches).
Sometimes it’ s loose,
as in the case
of cats: you feel how a
second life slides
under it. Sometimes it
fits. Take glass.
Sometimes it outlasts
its underside. Take reefs.
Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.
Susie Asado.
Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.
Susie Asado.
Susie Asado which is a told tray sure.
A lean on the shoe this means slips slips hers.
When the ancient light grey is clean it is yellow, it is a silver seller.
This is a please this is a please there are the saids to jelly. These are the wets these say the sets to leave a crown to Incy.
Incy is short for incubus.
