Monday, January 15, 2007

DISPATCHES FROM THE KINGDOM OF NO

A hologram is a hologram
Is a hologram, save
For the rapture of a man peddling

Sausages in a black stocking
Cap, unutterable terrors
Encompassing each inch of veritable

Movement into the realm
Of poetry, just as
It is a scandal to live outside

The history of saliva, conjuring
Meek spectacles from the department
Store display windows

The entire globe was surrounded
By quotes, though inside
The bakery an old man quietly

Held a cake emblazoned
With his granddaughter’s face
Like Hugo Ball

Restively clutching the 133-year-old skull
Of a 21-year-old girl and wishing
To paint its hollow cheek with kisses

Romancing a corpse
Or simply bargaining with war, atoms
Gripped loosely in the swinging

Of a thick fist, music
Tumbling from the vegetation as if
Today’s weather

Were attuned to a Promethean Chord
And it is, of
Course, the way the eye

Fixes disaster into art and isn’t it
Good to know winter
Is coming, not denying the skylark

Its gradual movement
Towards disintegration? I am
Not like a man

Who says I have never
Been interested in knowing
Knowing and yet

There is sometimes a dark
Companion who pulls, a castanet
Snapping talismanic, calling

The air into mass as in the sea
A dandelion self-disperses and here
On asphalt, a womanly

Hobo strikes at a damp matchbook
Sparks fizzling, I saw myself
Breathing and imagined a tiny tin finger

Rapping at my ribs, today
We saw a mangy parrot voicelessly
Traipse a limb, it’s freezing

In Brooklyn and we fear the parrot
Will not survive the night, the moon
Multiplying newness, caressing

Carcasses into alien
Readymades and is it right that we
Continue to try to love that part

Of ourselves sampling annihilation?

No comments: