Hickory, Dickory Dock
Hickory, dickory, dock,
The mouse ran up the clock.
The clock struck one,
The mouse ran down,
Hickory, dickory, dock.
High Tension Lines across a Landscape
There are diagrams on stilts all wired together
Over the hill and the wind and out of sight.
There is a scar in the trees where they walk away
Beyond me. There are signs of something
Nearly God (or at least most curious)
About them. I think those diagrams are not
At rest.
I think they are a way of ciphering God:
High Windows
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’ s fucking her and she’ s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives —
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
Hip-Hop Ghazal
Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat, swinging blue hips,
decked out in shells and splashes, Lawdie, bringing them woo hips.
As the jukebox teases, watch my sistas throat the heartbreak,
inhaling bassline, cracking backbone and singing thru hips.
Like something boneless, we glide silent, seeping 'tween floorboards,
wrapping around the hims, and ooh wee, clinging like glue hips.
Engines grinding, rotating, smokin', gotta pull back some.
Natural minds are lost at the mere sight of ringing true hips.
His Carpets Flowered
I
— how we’ re carpet-making
by the river
a long dream to unroll
and somehow time to pole
a boat
I designed a carpet today —
dogtooth violets
and spoke to a full hall
now that the gall
of our society’ s
corruption stains throughout
Dear Janey I am tossed
by many things
If the change would bring
better art
but if it would not?
O to be home to sail the flood
I’ m possessed
and do possess
Employer
His death in Benares
His death in Benares
Won’ t save the assassin
From certain hell,
Any more than a dip
In the Ganges will send
Frogs — or you — to paradise.
My home, says Kabir,
Is where there’ s no day, no night,
And no holy book in sight
To squat on our lives.
History Will Decide
All writing around the sides the persons a galaxy all writing resounds a hot history. All writing is in fact cut-ups history will decide games heated and heated economic behavior. To rise up scene all sounds of Tahrir and inside supply side threatened. A long delineation. Longer than I would be counting. This, a whisper, this the end of whisper time. Rise up and wiser this the streets of the world. Commission overheard in spin a soldiering one. What streets of the world to spin rubric’ s yes yes commerce, no, a no, no. Tanks of the blown-off world.
Hoffnung
He fancies his chances are good with her,
unaware that in the years since the war
she has come to prefer women whose cunts
taste like mustard. To pin one’ s hopes on
a bark-colored moth, its wings crinkled
like crepe paper, a moth affixed high
on the kitchen wall, frozen for days where
it will likely die in noble clinging mode
just under the cobwebby heating vent,
is to confirm your need for more friends
and a greater daily quota of sunlight.
To raise C.’ s hopes that T. can stop
hole
dis suit of clothes jus as empty
as a sky wid no stars
two years a workinsavin money
denjohn drop out my heart
i dont want ta see his wife
i knows dat she is me
i’ se could go inshootin de rifle
let my angry run free
bes notjust my temper risin
no use stoking dead fire
but ta see his face one mo time
now lordjus you on high
Hollow Boom Soft Chime: The Thai Elephant Orchestra
A sound of far-off thunder from instruments
ten feet away: drums, a log,
a gong of salvage metal. Chimes
of little Issan bells, pipes in a row, sometimes
a querulous harmonica.
Inside the elephant orchestra’ s audience,
bubbles form, of shame and joy, and burst.
Did elephants look so sad and wise,
a tourist thinks, her camera cold in her pocket,
before we came to say they look sad and wise?
Did mastodons have merry, unwrinkled faces?
Hollow boom soft chime, stamp of a padded foot,