1
The perfect mother lets the cat
sleep on her head. The
children laugh.
Where is she?
She is not carefully ironing the starched
ruffles of a Sunday dress.
What does she say?
She does not speak.
Her head is under the cat and
like the cat, she sleeps.
2
Pure veins of bogus blue-blood and such fancy hungers
~
In the end no surprise of reports of you dying younger than your gods
~
Kicked back in the classic toilet scene
~
With a spike in your arm and twelve large in pocket
~
Thanks to a lucky day scamming the dumb Social Services folks
~
It’ s a human thing, pants at your ankles, leaving unclean
~
Because life’ s road is only one night in a bad motel
~
Harry, you could play basketball in your bare feet, and win
~
When I wake now it’ s below ocherous, saw-ridged
pine beams. Haze streaks all three windows. I look up
at the dog-eared, glossy magazine photo
I’ ve taken with me for years. It gets tacked
like a claim to some new wall in the next place —
Bill Russell & Wilt Chamberlain, one on one
the final game of the 1969 NBA championship,
two hard men snapped elbowing & snatching at a basketball
as if it were a moment one of them might stay inside
forever. I was with
my father the night that game played
...
It was the summer I fucked up the summer fucked up me
fucked up a fuck-up in the summer & I spent time laying under stars
too much time I wasted the stars you lied to me under the stars
& the summer was endless the summer endless it was an endless summer
...
...
I was looking for your hair,
black as old lava on an island
of white coral. I dreamed it
deserted you and came for me,
wrapped me in its funeral ribbons
and tied me a bow of salt.
Let us tunnel
Through the rubble,
Through the thrum.
Let us rut through the sum
Of who we were,
Or are,
Or will be in the years to come:
A couple
Of someones
Who used to be in love.
Used to be in love.
Ho. Hum.
These days: Seem to be in hate.
Gypsum, marble, pyrite, slate.
See here. A pit of snakes.
Look there. The rock of your rages.
And I’ m in a cable-cage, slinking down your shaft.
You fondle that hefty What if...? as if
Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone;
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.
Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air;
The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
But shrink from voicing care.
Are we on the ground now? Ally cells and I said operations.
We cleared 50% of a wonderful friend and enduring opposition.
Take the solid.
Louder.
We clearly are loud. We are the postal system.
No evidence has been information.
Attacking the caves. Are you on the ground enduring?
A wonderful friend ramped it up.
You ought to open your mail.
Opposition element: the air. The talents work with precision.
84%. The population attacking the caves, the talents work with the
caves and tunnels.
The land was there before us
Was the land. Then things
Began happening fast. Because
The bombs us have always work
Sometimes it makes me think
God must be one of us. Because
Us has saved the world. Us gave it
A particular set of regulations
Based on 1) undisputable acumen.
2) carnivorous fortunes, delicately
Referred to here as “bull market”
And (of course) other irrational factors
Deadly smoke thick over the icecaps,
Our man in Saigon Lima Tokyo etc etc
