ALLEGRISSIMO

My eyes are no longer cut out
For the likes of midtown, they’ve grown
Accustomed to roofs, stoops, stores

Suffused by an affable
Dinginess and the textures of low
Sound droning

Without tedium, men call
My dad a man
Of decency, an old

World word, would that surprise
Might rupture the hideous
Simplicity of causation, that the tortoise

Might take the hippopotamus
For its charge as perhaps all faithfulness is born
From sloth, "they who have contrived

To retain ignorance" dare
Not tempt the wolf
When wolves they most easily

Become, bombastic architects
Of mediocrity, media’s winking fingers
Upon our knees, yet "no one lies so much

As the indignant" and I weep
Once every five years or so, dent
My knuckles on closed

Storefronts every month, give weekly
Thanks for the absurd
Surpluses of others as my sense

Of direction daily rearranges
Itself in heat, so I take out the fruit
Flies with the garbage

Don my silver shorts and whoosh
Around the park narrowly
Avoiding midday dope smokers’ fishing

Poles to visit the white-tipped
Wallaby recently tagged as Caribbean
Women push towheaded

Boys in overgrown strollers and "I want
To always be on film, to be
Caught in the cut coffee sober," to thrill

Allegrissimo in the perseverating
Predawn dash of birds, I applaud the real
Bodies of women, collapse

Into the tenderness of leisure and all
My bitter recriminations are sloughed in the line
Between void and voice

Between abyss and abundance, shoplifting
Teenagers spiriting lipstick amidst
Half-torn movie tickets, the roots of a once

Stately oak tree sprawled like tentacles
Across the quiet New Jersey
Street, tonight I will play ping

Pong and drink Negro
Modello, eye Elisa’s budding
Belly and anticipate

"Casimir Pulaski Day" at the Bowery
Ballroom, for life continues
To astonish, even as the bomb-laden

Believers of Iraq reek
Their fiery remuneration, a skein
Of cool air descends upon

Brooklyn and the incongruities
Mangle in ways that awe
My ability to reason, which is finally

Unnecessary, as is
My attachment to behavior for
We’ll all of us

Be new here in the end.