What passes for a jungle was falling
around my heels:  and such wastelands, hard
to come by, were reaching
like a hammock or a rip-
cord to take me with them, because nothing was
a token then:  and falling and keeping
on falling was the job of an egg crate
when only grown men knew
what an airfoil really looked
like ...  Sometimes a dark sermon
erupted from my shoelaces, and the ceiling
went transparent—it was only a life-
boat, Mom said, don't
worry—but the sun, that skinny
kid, always knew how to turn it into a joke
with that phony nostalgia-radio
sniggering of his.  His laughter chased me
a mile a minute down
corridors, across parking
lots, it fell on the tiles and spread
restrictions, like incense on
a jumprope:  not feeling steam-rollered
exactly, but the linoleum had
to be careful, edged the way it was;
it snuck around the room not
saying anything, not wanting
to provoke him.
                       So
he headed east to the copper
mountains, and what he found there
would have rung like a saw
if its history of inspired dance
maneuvers had had license to
repeat, like an Austrian ball-
room.  Purple with his face
done up in that modern
drag, he ascended
in his terrible go-cart.  And the sky
was pinioned up behind him, monkey figures
positioned themselves elaborately at
his heels:  but he always had more courage
than song-writing savvy, the ski-
jumper, though it was his job
to be distracted—and he ended up
just another victim of
gravity, just hanging there
all balled up in someone else's borrowed
confetti-suit.  Then
there was that trek in reverse, but that's
not part of this
story.
         And what happened
to that dream-of-falling poem that got you
locked in the cellar among tentacles
all those years?  Those gate-keepers pressured
into bas-relief, just a pair
of old hands really, just
because they were stoned and
the night at the end of the quay glared
blue-silver, the night of rental
vans, and then look at them too falling with their big doors
into self-criticism!  "You look like someone
that got let out of school on an imitation
stomach-ache," o but
it was a medicien to me of all
my days, a beggar's banquet
that defined "fin de siècle" as
a shoebox is made much
of, in being removed:  hard to be returned
with all its mint-condition yellows
and gold in order, it was
a swing! laboring in mechanical
uprisings:  because it shattered
so easily, it was like a criminal's stop-
watch, all secondhands.
                                  And it was
his hope, when the parable
of his youth had recommenced, that
his challengers would be met
and abolished under the stone
of his hard-won increase.  Reader,
whose house was it anyway?  When the weather
joked with me about my size,
I let it pass:  because I was a brave
boy, I had a casino
in my pocket.  What matter if the roof
fell in on me?  We'd just
have to get another.  And then the gun
sounded, and we were caught
in the flowing night, in its tide
of error, the mysteries of the sun
were shut off from us
by its legions of pensive ghosts:  I
was no more fruitful than they
had been, with
or without your intervention.  And the cream-
colored stars come and
go, playing their turkey tunes
above the ice melt, and the withered palms
of the collectors are stretched out
for any shards that might want to
impale them:  and my useless inspiration
finds itself with another
drastic mess on its hands.  Page
One:  How I Failed to Thrive.

posted by michael  3:25:15 PM  
tell me about it []