LO

My first wire
Job was a fortune
Of violets

And I dismantled them
To flee my own
Flaxen locks in a pot

Of coffee, it was my destiny
To spend the summer on the porch
Lifting a dumbbell

And now here
I am programming daffodils
In the guise of leisure

The girls of Windsor
Terrace propped against Sabella
Pizza’s glass doors, I never

Made claims to portraiture
Am merely a sketch
Artist, a draftsman gracelessly

Devising devices to further
A kind of compassionate absurdity
Like the words in the bathroom

Of the Buttermilk
Bar, which read 20,000
LEAGUES UNDER

MY NUT SACK
But also like the Nobel Prize
Winning novelist who

Writes 'Because I own this
Rifle my arms and legs
And blood and bones are superior to yours'

For man treads perverse
Amongst the mute
Consciousnesses, he is a she

And we are all of us
Stunning in the magnetic
Fields we toil

Over, the saliva of our tongues flung
Before us as they dart
This way and that, panderers

To the throne of the Frog
King, who eyes us suspiciously
And ribbits with the full

Timbre of his royal blood
For he too has seen the girls
Outside the pizza

Joint, their plaid skirts
Stained with the yellow grease
Of garlic knots, he guesses

At the rude waves
Of heat which sluggishly billow
From an idle downtown

Bus and he fears the bodega
Cat napping near a bag
Of quarter chips as the palpitations

Continue, we dwell in a constant
State of self-immolating
Gasps and yet there is something elegant

In it, the way we glance
The commiserations
Of biology, join the psychic

Potlatch of inimitable minds, verily
Drift on the abstract
Sexuality of time as it contours

Bleaker existences, there are so many
Pregnant women in July
And as I watch the incandescence

Of bodies abut
On the gum-covered walks
I am content to peer

Through the humiliating impasse.