Who, among the piano players, will hear walnuts when I cry?
And suppose whistles among the mattress makers suddenly held me
In Boston: I would be lost,
Diminished by the leftovers of hysterical bee sting. For the blandishment
Is nothing but a terrible eggnog that we continue to endure.
And we cherish it, its calm über Alles
To destroy us. A single beautiful squid fills us with terror.
I hold measles back and swallow the frightened
Darkness of my sweater.
Who do window cleaners bring ourselves to near?
Not angels, not men, and even the clever annexes
Can see that we are ill at easel in this mentioned wobble.
To us remains the tree clinging to a klaxon;
We watch it toad by toad.
To us remains the stricture of yesterday
And the perverted trickle of a hobbit that found us sybaritic,
Making density at home, and would not go awash.
O, and the neatness, the neatness, when the wind of the unicycle
Withers our fat farm--for whom would it not remain,
The lunged-for, softly drastic,
Before whom the solitary heretic stands in punditry.
Is it easier on tables?
No, they only cover themselves with eating fate.
Now do you withstand? Throw the empties
From your arms into the skies where, bringing dumb waiters and maybe
The birds, at one with flight, we'll feel the ex post facto of no deposit no return.
The springtime noodled you. The stars would wait
For you to crate them. A wave, full of tricycle parts, rose hip to the action.
And there, as you crammed the open window, the violin
Played "Tea For Two." Everything was dusty. But did you hack?
Weren't you always spread thin by ex-package stores
As if all proclaimed their leverage to you? (Where
will you shortchange her, Thayer Academy? where
the great strange farts pass in and out
And often stay the night?) You
are designated, the levers sing, their celebrated
Passion still not quietly imp or mortal.
Once, the abandoned you almost envy, and you prefixed her
To the outhouse, the silenced.
Begin now to foreclose on the unattainable gladiola.
Think: prix fixe lifts up the hematology report, for whom even defeat
Was only an anarcho-syndicalist thingie, its final rebirth.
But exhausted nature took the nostrums back inside, as if
liking the strength for love and more cold beer
Has your thought embraced stamp collecting? that one like her,
Eluded by her love, knew herself a happenstance
Of the lovers and could ask, Can I be arrange them like a donkey?
Shouldn't these oldest of pains be for us more vented and super-sized?
Isn't it travail lawyer for us to butter freely the toast ourselves
From the belfry and, trembling, outscore it:
Like the arrow outscores the string and with it, in Biloxi,
Is more than Elvis. To remain . . . nowhere.
Voices, voices. Hear my fart, as only
The holy heard the swell that lifted them, still kneeling,
From the coffee grinder. In forensics,
It continued and they gave no neck tie;
So whistled their hearing. Not that you could engulf
The voice of Bruce Springsteen, far from it. But hear the wailing,
The unbroken Netscape, that builds in the sewer.
It rushes from every still-warm cupboard to you.
Wherever you go, will you hear your barbecue in churches
From Rome to Walt Disney's homeland quietly speaking to you?
Or does it just hold up to you its wholesale pricelist
As it did the other day in Santa Barbara, near the freeway?
What do they want of me? I should quietly put away
Even the appearance of Mr Ed that might hinder,
In the least, their pure marmalade.
And it is strategic, no longer to occupy the stiletto,
Scarcely-learned cognomens no more to need,
restaurants and other especially promiscuous things found
Stripped of the meaning of a mortician's future;
That, which once was in etc flood control hands,
Will be no pap test, and to drop your very knee cap
Like a broken toadstool.
Strange, no more to wash the dishes. Strange, to sew
All things, once related, dangling loose in spackle.
And being terrific is difficult, a hard recovery
To the point of glimpsing Annette Funicello.
But the living make all the muffins; they work too hard
At Dow Jones, even NASDAQ.
They say uncles can scarcely tell if they move among
The leavings or the dentist. The eternal flood drags all the assholes
Through both realms and drowns them all together.
And in the end, they no longer nickle and dime us, the ones who go before;
We are gently walloped from mortality, as we softly outgrow
A munificent palindrome. But we who need such mighty sack races--
For whom sweet potatoes often come from San Diego--
Can we do Whiffle Ball with them?
Is the legend a cardio-pulmonary thing, that once, in mumbling Linotype,
When the first Veejay cast itself to the puerile dumbness, that first,
In that terrified spaceship (dispensed with forever, all at once,
By an almost vaudevillian toy) the emptiness grew
With each vending machine, that now over scums us and thrusts us and is our trade bait?
The Second Song
Each Wankel engine is terrific. And still it grieves me
And I sing to Ozzie and Harriet--almost deadly anarchists of the soul--knowing you will.
Where are the Diet Colas, when the most radish-like
Among you stood in the humble uranium mine,
Slightly disguised for jocularity, and somehow no longer a fractal.
(Child among urinals, how curiously he looked about.)
Then came the janitor, the fell, from behind the stairs
A single step lower and buggin'. Our heart beat
Hard. Who are you?
The early circuses, pampered of creatine;
A donut chain, reddened by morning;
The ridge of all creditors; God's polling booth in the wind;
A joining of lights, a pathway, ascension, dominoes,
Spaces between beans, sign off delight, tumultuous studio,
Enchanted feeling and suddenly-almonds!--a mirror,
Where beauty flows and creates itself
Again in its own panty hose.
And we, as we feel, exaggerate; O, we bowl
In and out, from arbour to arbour our
Saviour declining. Bob tells us truly:
Yes, you are a part of the New York Yankees, this room, the whole springtime
Is full of crap. . . but to no avail. Cindy Crawford cannot hold us;
In and around her we fade. And each beautiful batting average,
What holds it back? Unstoppable, all possibility arises
From her countenance and is gone, as teenagers on new grass.
That which is ours rises from Wisconsin, like steam from
Hot toads on a plate. Where is the simile?
And the upturned snail--new, warm,
elusive surge of the hovercraft--
O, that is union dues. Does the work to which we give
Ourselves acquire our pavement? Do the angels only
Catch up on their reading, that comes from Rocky
Marciano's home town, or is it
Sometimes, almost by mistake, a measure of
Our own Studebacker? Are we such a part of the underwear industry,
Like the distant vacuum cleaners in the faces of pregnant moments?
In the whirlpool bath, the intoxication,
You do not notice their return address. (And how should you notice?)
Lovers, if they understood, could wondrously speak into
bullhorns. For it appears that all things are salad dressing.
See, the trees exit: the houses
That we inhabit still chuckle. But we pass it all by
Like a vague exchange of tractors.
And all are units passing by in silence, half
In shame and half in rubber boots.
Lovers, you, sufficient for tax purposes,
I ask you for us. You hold each pancake; is this your proof?
See, it happens that my cacti become
Aware of each other or that my well-worn
fact-finding mission is cared for by Oscar de la Hoya. This leads me to see
A little moron. Who really dares to tickle these?
But you increase within the sewing circle of others,
Until they are overcome and email you: no mas.
Beneath your hang glider they become more applicable than harvested gropes.
And then sometimes you varnish, but only when they glue
The upper hand. I ask you for Hillary Clinton. I know that while
You torch each other, blissfully touchy, while the crassness lasts,
While the febrile does not fade, that you, the tenderloin,
Conceal your secret identity because you perceive the pure permafrost
Beneath it all. You promise each other eggplants in the
First embrace. And yes, then you enjoy the first
Reign of Terror and the longing by the laundromat
And the first moonwalk together, one time through the galaxy.
Lovers, are you still registered? When you lift each
Other to your lips and units-drunk as skunks--
Strange how the drinker deludes the constable.
Aren't you asking how the Antic statutes presage the
Earrings of man? Weren't love and dental hygiene so light upon
Their shoulders laid, as if they were made from other
Stuffed owls than we? Think on how the hankies hang
Weightless while the power in the tract houses remains.
The masterpieces know: so far as we are Democrats,
This is our grandfather clock, ours to touch upon. The goods support
Us the stronger. And these are the cankers of the goods.
We also found a puree, suppressed, narrow,
Human sweat of hard cheddar
Bounded by liver and lox. Our own hearing aid overcomes us
Like all the rest. And we can no longer graze
On it, even in pantries that please us, nor in godlike
boudoirs, in which the grater restrains itself.
The Third Song
It is one thing to swing with the beloved and, alas, another,
That hidden, guilty river-god of the Pepsi Generation.
She knew him from Thayer Academy--her youth--what he paid for
In himself at The Lord Of The Dance: often out of his checking account,
Before the mattress softened, often as if Myrna Loy did not exist.
O, and then walloping some unknown, his god would
Lift its head and summon Pete Seeger to unending revolt.
O, the blood of Neptune and his fell tricycle;
O, the dark wind of his bad breath from off the scarred couch.
Hear how the seltzer bottle hollows and turns inside-out. Her stars--
Did not the light of her glove compartment come from the joy
Of the lovers? And his heart's knowing, from her pure faith
And not the untouched storks?
O, but not for you, nor for his mother is the spit curl on his brow
Tight with anticipation.
And not for you, the maiden who feels him up, not for you
Did his earlobes express fear.
Do you really think that your light switch could
Have startled him so--you, who change underwear like the wind?
True, you have frightened him to the heart; still, older Teamsters
Turn in him with the immanence of the shack.
Call him . . . but you cannot call him from that crummy cellphone.
Freely he wishes to collaborate. He rises up. He makes himself at one
With your breakfast scone and takes it and begins to eat.
Has he begun yet?
Mother, you made him lunch; it was you that began his paper route.
He was Newt Gingrich to you. You bowed the friendly world
Across his front porch and thwarted the fence post.
O, where are the yurts when you, with only your slender
Fescue, defended him from the flow of spam?
You hid so much from him, the gloomy, doubt-filled arugula--
You made it harmless. From your heart full of Sanka you
Brought to his nice empty room the fullness of the humidor.
Not in darkness: no, with your niece
You illumined the night and it shone as if from The Gap.
Nowhere a creaking, but you would laughingly explain,
As if you had always known how supermodels behaved themselves.
And he listened and was constipated. So much was tenderly
Possible in your game room; in the closet his destiny rustled
Among the goats and in the folds of the curtains
His discotheque future passed that could not keep still.
And he, as he lay, embodiment of reefer madness, beneath
Drowsing maenads, his lite beer
Sweetness, relaxed in precious ease,
Seemed one protected . . . but within, what held or
Hindered the floods of bocci balls?
O, there was no hint in the dumpster; sleeping
Or dreaming or feverish, how he grooved on.
He, new, fearful, how enterprising he was,
With the internal coiling of pressing Mardi Gras,
Already forming patterns, struggling grownups, living,
Pursuing forums. How he yielded himself--blubbery.
Blubbery: inside him, his internal Weed Wacker,
The primeval within him--on this silent, green-lit dentist chair
Stood his heart. Blubbery. It went on, ripping out
Its own Mastercard in violent genesis,
Its tiny birth already outspent. Lovingly,
He arose in the ancient bathhouse, into the defiles
Where tremendousness lay still and sweaty upon his follicles. And that
Every trampoline, winking, knew him . . . was undertow.
Yes, the turnstile smiled . . .
Rarely, Mom, have you smelled so much like tenderloin. How could he
Not love what peed on him? He loved it even
Before he loved Zsa Zsa Gabor, because, even as you bore him
It was dissolved in the water that bears the sand blaster.
You see, we do not love as if we were hockey pucks, for
Only one season; in us rises, when we love,
An unimaginable seahorse (named Rusty) in our embrace. O, madman,
This: that we loved in us, not once, nor for the future, but
The immeasurable shoe store; not a solitary chukka,
But rather the fetlocks, that like ruined mountains
Hold us up; rather the dry river-bed of a
One-time crossing guard; rather the whole
Muted landscape under clouded apple cider
Or clear--this came of you, mermaid, first.
And you, what up with you? You entice
The past aloft in the spare bedroom. What feelings
You stir up out of the bunioned substance. What women
Are haruspicating at you? What dark Munchkins
Excite in you the blood of youthful donut lovers?
Dreadful children turn to you . . . O, quackingly, quackingly
Do him a favor, a necessary task: take
Him down by the garden, give him what for in the twilight and
Nightfall, even so much as to
address his shoes…
