When the moon fell out of my mouth an
ocean of coffee flowed from
Hitchcock’s exploded marrow,
roaring through robotic airholes like the
pants of a dozen alcoholics
rioting inside a car trunk built for 4.
Alfred’s plastic spoon stirred
kerosene into critical speed benchmarks,
upending traditional assumptions of
aging and decay with
foul but predictable outbursts of
anger expressed by
rattled keychains and
cameo fabrications.
Great works of art,
stacked vertically,
stand along Madison Avenue,
a road nearly abandoned.
The Avenue has become an Interstate,
sponges piled on sponges,
locusts piled on hocus-pocus.
Playthings for the city’s future
shoveled onto shelves where
thickened plots spoil futuristic foodstuff in
covert assembly of a planet’s vibration.
Wither and writhe,
cluck at a lonesome pigeon,
do not pound tables to
scare the bird away.
Try to understand its chorus,
listen to the bird’s
cruelly sycophantic restoration of its
ancestors’ sounds, wait for
birdshit dumped on your
forebears’ heads and shoulders,
listen for a worthy flapping of ancient air.
This is a plaything for your children,
a reservation for temporal porousness,
an opportunity for infinity to
squeeze through endless fences
separating highway from sunset.
I skin the neck of 53rd Street,
blubbering pliant mumbles to myself with
nauseous patriotism,
welling up with tears at
unfortunate points in an
overheard conversation,
declining to explain — even to myself —
on account of needing to go
too far into a city’s psychosis to
reverse-engineer
bunions of consciousness that
summoned sadness and selfishness where
none was needed.
At home I trade the mop for an automatic machine gun.
I swap unused writing implements with increased barometric pressure.
I invalidate memories of angry encounters with cravings for sugar.
I restart a solitary footstep by flubbing lines memorized in grade school.
Brave and hungry the
grafted clods of politics
hint at minted drivel.
The brass rivets that once
held their church together became
molten slabs of stinking leather,
the organization and its memberships
rolling into proportional obscurity.
Boarding a train to garbage they
moped, pouted, tried guilty persuasion to
secure votes from torrential sobriety,
rivaled each other for excellence in
villainy, stroked exertions of
grounded opinions, howled like drowned anger,
stuttered limits in crowded minds and
treated themselves to dances on obscene wilderness.
They fantastically woke up among tombstones but
embellished the memory for retelling.
Hot and true their keychains rattled,
bitter signals through kitchen noises,
signals transformed by context into
regulations and repetitions,
slaying normalcy’s handcuff.
Content to lob infinities at
stranded troubles hunched in
thank-you notes a passing despot
tricked these warring nations into
praising the wrong dusk,
tricked them into blasting accolades at
outdated newspapers covered with
sooty vandalism, tricked them into
boarding a bus departing Madison Avenue for
destinations unknown, the warriors
sharing unabashed banalities, the
nervousness of travel charging anxieties like
wedding invitations dumped into
mechanical bank mergers.
Some came to believe in the
compromise of being wrong, the
disability of a captain at the
helm of a school bus,
a quarterback at a chicken shoot,
a plumber at a powwow.
