Free Verse

1

John-O was given a key to the apartment. The deal
was this: if Phil died suddenly, and John-O heard,
he would rush on over, enter the apartment, leave
unseen with Phil’ s brown suitcase, and secretly pitch it
into the mounded deeps of the city dump.
Simply, there were things that Phil didn’ t want
to hurt his family with. Do you have yours?

The soil I’ m walking over comes

from deeper: a fire had done it in,
a stewpot had suddenly popped
and its contents streamed
out wave over wave until
it reached the water, until the sea
called it a day and struck back

— Hoooooooo
Lay in an array of pixels
Fat, simulated proteins
Looks just like nutrition!
Acts just like an avatar!
I just wanted to give my body to
A net of guarine
Gingko-balboa azatine melamine
Camphobacter phylacter nicotine
Which hung like neuron-nectar in a cell, net of
Vatic coughdropped hairball tells the future of
Neural center where the straight lines hopped
Like a hairline fracture on a bender jumps a
Mulholland retaining wall and crashes the crinkled Vale of
Food-for-thought

The puppy must be learned of all this material.
No map of the hospital. First, the war effort.
Then, the war itself. The water makes and remakes
its walls. No persons or boats are allowed in them.

I.

Let me speak with expressive

hesitation & a feeling for

interment why even

lineate what isn’ t broken by

music let me speak with

inextricable reluctance.

I want to tear the heart

from refused convalescence

& feed it those long fronds

of river bed grass. I want to

tear the heart out of style

& put it between

utter thrall & the infancy

of all things impure.

Torn out, a flame thickens

between us as if

not right now we’ ll be

ripped from this life

Doubt not
the artist and his age
(though bald as the pilled head of garlic),
married or divorced
and even vying downstage,
are both aware
that God or Caesar is the handle
to the camel’ s hair.

The glass door was spinning panes
like an open book.
A suit the color of sky close to night,
wire of eyeglasses a gold moon.

He bowed as if judicial
and called a French name.
Glasses were filled with ice
the color of amber.

We were in America.

He asked me to take his hands.
They are cold, he said.
I warmed his cold hands
as we sat on the rouge banquette.

It was the last May of the century.

Now the summer air exerts its syrupy drag on the half-dark
City under the strict surveillance of quotation marks.

The citizens with their cockades and free will drift off
From the magnet of work to the terrible magnet of love.

In the far suburbs crenellated of Cartesian yards and gin
The tribe of mothers calls the tribe of children in

Across the bluing evening. It’ s the hour things get
To be excellently pointless, like describing the alphabet.

Music: Sexual misery is wearing you out.
Music: Known as the Philosopher’ s Stair for the world-weariness which climbing it inspires. One gets nowhere with it.
Paris: St-Sulpice in shrouds.
Paris: You’ re falling into disrepair, Eiffel Tower this means you! Swathed in gold paint, Enguerrand Quarton whispering come with me under the shadow of this gold leaf.
Music: The unless of a certain series.
Mathematics: Everyone rolling dice and flinging Fibonacci, going to the opera, counting everything.
Fire: The number between four and five.