style="font-size:15px;"> to understand when one
who represented the desperate
shrunken state came toward
me, bisecting the whole mass
of concrete into triangles;
and handed me a package.
I carried it with me for
the rest of my life, never
opening it, telling no one.
The Last Days of April
Through the ceiling comes
the rain to cool my lover
and me. The lime carpeting
darkens, and when we cross
to retrieve our glasses
of gin from the mantle, our
feet sink as into drifts
of leaves. We have a deep
thirst, for it is the end
of April, and we know that
a great heat is coming soon
to deaden these passions.
Uncle
Homer was a ventriloquist;
so drunk, one day he projected his voice
so far it just
kept going and going (still is).
Joe Ray insisted
Homer was afraid of work, but he’s
had 130 jobs or more
just recently, he didn’t think in terms
of careers.
The family never
cared for Homer
even after
he ginned himself into a wall
and died balling
with a deaf-mute in an empty Kansas City hall.
Joe Ray insisted
Homer would have made a fine dentist
had he kept his mouth shut; that is,
had he lived. Still is
heard about the house
jiggling glasses,
his devoted astral voice coming back.
How the Friends Met
So what do you do? What
can you do? Leave the room
altogether? Crazy.
Your eyes are the wallpaper;
makes it tough, doesn’t it?
Peel them away. You call
that pain? It’s not. It’s insane.
You make it. Keep going.
Confront a lightpole. Smoke
a mythopoeic
cigarette forever.
Mark a spot with your
mysterious shoe; scratch
Hate in the sidewalk.
A man will come along
and there will be reason
enough to knife him. Sure
enough, there comes along
a worse-than-Bogart….
There you are, smoking
the lightpole. The spot
you marked appears between
your eyes, and then becomes
a sidewalk, and the man
walks right up the sidewalk
into your room, looks at
the wallpaper, and laughs.
So what do you do? What
can you do? Kick him out?
Hell, no. You charge him rent.
Tragedy Comes to the Bad Lands
Amnesic goatherds tromboning
on the summit, the lazy
necklaces of their own breath
evanesce into the worst
blizzard since Theodore
Roosevelt and the Marquis
de Mores blessed Medora, North
Dakota with their rugged
presence. Look! I implore, who’s
sashaying across the Bad
Lands now—it’s trepid riding
Tate (gone loco in the
cabeza) out of his little
civilized element—Oh!
It’s bound to end in tears.
Aunt Edna
Aunt Edna of the hills
comes down to give
her sisters chills;
she wears the same
rags she wore
seven years ago,
she smells
the same, she tells
the same hell-
is-here stories.
She hates flowers,
she
