Juvenalia
Three afternoons, two evenings and five men in carpets, twice
Streetwalker, side my monolith! Say “pleez man,
some mo’ buttah?” Say polyps, no, “polyps”, and Priapus broods anger.
Streaks white (with a rain). And massively, we sit.
Oh, “Po’ boy…stay in school!” All right, fucked, and mourning,
but Texaco’s up and time’s in store; we live to ride our stilts! What
right’s all Manichean, what’s wrong’s just cloisters and pity.
So maybe it’s time for the night to station. Reckless and coke lines
straighten faces; bludgeon life out of life and stay put to make it.
Singing “biddily bumpty boo,” Quetzalcoatl ties his shoe.
Checked out
Time to shut the blinds and reiterate
over china and permanganate
about the trapeze men and starlets
and how they put on their show
When the threats to our prefects only suffice
the stucco chandeliers,
the kangaroo courts, televised
murder Mondays and nonsense—
you don’t care and its not
my place to comment
they never bothered anyone
and places are only for going places
But this is a warning for all the turkey
sandwiches, spit shine, mausoleums
and tortoise shell – the sky, the market, and
twelve more thoughts until bed.
Ritual (or “poem in the conditional tense”)
and that night I’d ascend watching seven steps ahead at
cross-hatch black stockings white thighs bleeding through
she’d unlock a steel door I had passed often but never knew
and soon she’d exit the night
little else would be exceptional just blossoms on the side-
walk just three that I’d notice so white on gray and grid and
a man would smell like airport in the elevator he’d squeeze his wife
or maybe girlfriend and they’d forget I exist before midnight
I’d return to gates unopened and flowers underfoot hold them
up hold it open “hold on” and talk now
tell them what I’d seen oh it’d be a tender moment we’d
all drink tea in our faces and feet along someone’s imagination
that night the clouds would rout the sky would
scorch the earth would free the world to hiss
the sound we forgot the record’s dead the autumn’s
ablaze and you and I are finished, or would be