time to rob a city of its lights
what I have always wanted to steal from you is your oblivion, fair city.
authentic city, you are my chaos of restaurants. I slaketh you to lie down
in red and green traffic lights. you are the Golgotha of my compression
and coercion of immersion ethnic brothels huddled-up in elevators with cudgels
and I guess that the best invention was glass until the window-washer came
but I would like to parachute through your illegal airspace tonight
for you have drugged me into driving to the edges of everything for drugs
and this final epochpolis of wondrous apocalypse written on every face of grit
and on every vendor’s shirt and every marquis as your diaspora of lights
crashes up into its spread womb of a sky and I see the last lamp shoot up
into her universe seconds before my own impact with stealing the wrong light
my theory on going to bars
take twenty dollars worth of quarters
go to a place with at least two payphones
and one jukebox
you go in weighed down and loud
wear pants twice your size, at least
don’t adjust your belt and drink a pitcher
of Newcastle, you won’t have many quarters
left, but, on the jukebox play the Pretenders,
Social Distortion, the Clash, and get rid
of your twenty dollar lodestone
it is a dollar for a game of pool
or for a bowl of popcorn and you make two
calls you shouldn’t have and then
you are weaseled, bamboozled, or muscled out
then you slink home lithely, weightlessly
under the buzzing of an Iowa sky, steeples,
the skyline, the street guitarists, the closed
and locked-down bratwurst carts, and the train
is crossing the road two blocks
from your front door
as you watch it roar
and roar inside
juggler’s wish
I can hold all
of my desires in
one hand, and
when it comes to this
I am the juggler’s wish.
There are two bubbles
there, cast inside
the marble, or two lovers
captured forever
in exquisite oil paints.
I want to know
the Rosetta stone
in the center of every bone.
The lore of every pore.
Your maddening core.
I bind myself to you.
With Rimbaud’s ribbons
and screaming gibbons
with lightning and squalls
I will hold onto
The sinking anchor you.
Fold me away
keep me in your dry reply
lie me down in the crease
between two pages
where your perfect poem is.
Place me
in the hope-chest
the top drawer
I will stay wrapped in
your blue negligee’ skin.
Harlequin end this ceaseless
juggling. I am no hooligan;
you are not a nunnery begotten.
We should settle-up.
A slut deserves a slut.
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