AMERICAN MUSIC

I don’t plan to address
My understanding
Of death, which, according

To the sometime apothecary, is
A physical impossibility, but when you close
My fingers in your own, bones

Are alive, even as the bald man
Sitting at the table next to ours thumbs
Through a magazine about guns

I can look out the window to where
A blossom of birds issues
From an abandoned skyscraper or traffic

Enacts its unwitting algorithms
Of pulse, it is in
Pulse that such thought

Arrives, in pulse
That it recedes, just as these city
Bodies orbit relative

To the attention they are
Paid, one eye
Ogling another, space

A capacity for the patent
Enumeration of our feelings
About etceteras

About the important ideas: love
Loss, breakfast, noise, terror, I refuse
The counsel of stupidity

Regarding such matters, this equals
That, take it from us, watch
Your back, buy a car, make money only

To spend it establishing
Your identity, and so the disassociations
Of velocity continue unabated

Halving and trebling
Ourselves into metropolitan collage
Involved or unloved, naïve

Devotees of cryptozoological
Findings, the wrack
Of semblance, a chimp

Named Oliver whose lack
Of teeth made for a humanoid
Mug, poor fucker

But not so unlike the experience
Of anyone thick enough to live
Through it, modernity

That is, the chalky abstinence
Of our nowadays fraught
With a stubbornness to dissolve

Into pixels, our greatest
Poets hounded by lavender, the yelp
Of an old catamount plaguing

The suburbs, in Bhutan
It’s said the local Yeti survives
On a diet of frogs, I tend

To these stories carefully, knowing
The public to scoff
At the indulgence of dreams

Unsanctified, my beard
Hedging outward as a rote
Continuance finds

Justification difficult in the face
Of encapsulated truths, my truths
Equal suddenly to any

Small observation of cheer
The weeds reaching
Dutifully toward what gravity

Deems us opposite to, the sopor
Of a steadily impinging commonplace
And for the same reason

Skunks find harbor
Under the floorboards
Of a prison, we

Lay our androgynous howling before
Suns of uninhabitable
Chemistry or ‘the lonely wail

Of that old Cannonball blazing
Through the night,’ it’s American
Music I have come to

Bring you you redoubtable ear.