Popular Culture

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.

They moved across the screen like a computer simulation.
They moved across the screen like complex models & we learned
to call this a nature show.
Animals but set in gray shades for video capture with a lighter area for
the face.
Almost white they moved across the screen like a compressed
meditation.
But the song was never familiar.
Because this was the only room this was the only room where we

Our grand peregrinations through these temporary cities,
These pale window box poppies of the laughing class,
Drifting as if time came in the same long dollops as starlight,
Resemble an epic journey as a coffee bean resembles a llama’ s foot,
Though the kitchen table may be far from the desert
It’ s near in spirit, a yellow oasis before the wind
Starts its restless sweeping of white flower-dust across the lintel,
Marking the fine edge of things like children asleep
At the opera, piled up near the door, summer passing

James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree
Took great
Care of his Mother,
Though he was only three.
James James
Said to his Mother,
“Mother,” he said, said he:
“You must never go down to the end of the town,

Too many are leaving
usually they greet in sleep before dashing
as in today with this gentleman
(awkward not to type his name)
when yesterday in the shower
I remembered his face in Aardvark
something about NWA but not about them
just a played reference
There were newspaper clips
all police brutality, all framed with snow
& I vaguely recalled something
about Uma Thurman & the Menils
when the guard ushered me out
for touching the African sculptures
I waited in the lobby for hours

the streets of hell are also paved
with fear of contagion
I have been swimming
in enough barbed-wire waters to know
you’ re not even safe on the beach
it’ s not just your “body fluids”
it’ s the grime of your skin
those dirty things you think

they are cleaning up the world again
I can see the inflammation
heartbreak & hunger scurry me down
on the road to Damascus
I want to be blinded like Saul
for the sake of vision
not just cause I can’ t take it anymore

Man is so afraid, he look down at cock, long ago many
centuries ships land on the enemy’ s beach, take down
mast in the dark, climb up cliffs in the fog, ram
enemy’ s door, do bad things in castle, oh yea, man
go crazy play in blood like baby with duck in bathtub,
man think about favorite dog, got worms in heart, takes
dog to field trial, dog sniffs out man’ s lies, point
at fool in frozen water, fool man, dead dog, man look
at leaf frozen in pond, man think about woman in new

The one cashier is dozing —
head nodding, slack mouth open,
above the cover girl spread out before her on the counter
smiling up
with indiscriminate forgiveness
and compassion for everyone
who isn’ t her.

1981,
&  for three days in Nebraska
penny loafers are the talk, the thirties sensation
all over again in one-light towns.
Three days in Nebraska,
&  a hundred calves come out bloody & new
as Wahoo &  Alma &  Dunning hum

Must Sean Penn always look like he’ s squeezing
the last drops out of a sponge and the sponge
is his face? Even the back of his head grimaces.
Just the pressure in his little finger alone
could kill a gorilla. Remember that kid
whose whole trick was forcing blood into his head
until he looked like the universe’ s own cherry bomb
so he’ d get the first whack at the piñata?
He’ s grown up to straighten us all out
about weapons of mass destruction
but whatever you do, don’ t ding his car door with yours.