I woke up on Fridays at six, as God
the clockmaker’d beckoned me but
by a scroll or a vision or some shrill
allen wrench twisted a tic or a
twitch to the left, to the left,
to the right, and the right again,
always with coffee and cigarettes; yet,
this morning my very last cigarette seemed
to be furnishing maybe an ozone machine
for Pod and Homily Clock—and
as the Marathon station, formerly
owned by the men who would
blow on and bless all the lot-
tery tickets, had traded hands,
its wood-paneled flesh now
expressly prosthetic, a ply-
wood impression of crow’s-
footed cellophane seething;
and all of the cigarettes
there, now snared in just
this lumpy, slumping staleness, that
made the great hemlock blight
read more as an underfed flower
pot cracked caulk-greige with
tatty and gasping, rat-kinged
spearmint—
and the Felix Street corner store, stuck
still sporting some toe-sprawled spall of
eddying yellow wood, tacked to the
cracked and impacted door, bent
splintered to blistering ridgeback hackles,
had altered their moseying opening now
from seven to eight—and eight was
too late, and, maybe, what’s more, as my
smoker’s devotion had grown to a
need for a morning cigarette, strictly
to plumb what rankling waste that a
sweltering yesterday studded my stom-
ach with still—I scudded off over the
cross-armed flanks of a tick-afflicted,
car-throbbed Broadway, off to the
7-11 my partner had mentioned
once seeming like sitcom fodder,
the humus of some great play or
something, epics cracked hourly
under the crackling awning that
dared defy dead Chekhov’s gun—
En route, what accreted like
poplar blossoms and plastic
sacks in a throat-scratched
shower-drain sewer grate,
stammering: first, what seemed
but a big gulp cup left
crucified over a re-
trofitted tobacco stave, seeming
the tar-eaten tooth of a
semaphore marking the
sidewalk cracked like a
dive-impacted palate a
cat’s scrunched trying
to wildly suture in sleep—
some cross-eyed pundit’s
tooth-pale graffito pressed
fizzling, blistering, pimpling
deeper in fractured skin of some
stop-light’s skull scuffed, scarcely
saltine-solid, still steadily echoing
Bush & Cheney ’04 in a
ripple of nearby seam-
ripped hyacinths vying to
shrivel up under the shade
of the twee little sheep
weed, lamb’s ear lolling like
sickly tongues clung over an
icicle’s phantom appendages
pinned in the wind still—
coppery glint of a crumpled Ferrero
Rocher shell squirming from
under some sudsing, iron-on possum’s
carcass ensconced in the
swollen swale set green and
alive as the sobering, homely,
and dispossessed beggars and
tradesmen, trilling in
step with the blushing and
pockmarked cloud bank burrowed
above as but burning butter, all
trying to cud of the glum summer
mugginess some scarce moment’s
rest,
the restive expression of what
was the night’s sly, slippery
hellbender respite bent now
barely to three or four mewling cop
cars, respite slipping astray of the
pimpling morning but boiled to
bubbling celluloid—was it a
zoetrope squarely knit together with
movement, meaningful under-
currents, the scattershot reek of
sewer-lolled scat and just what’s left
of a house cat’s war path, or
maybe, simple as soles spray over
the clover, the scurrilous
concrete, slack-jawed
windshields’ central
incisors spat,
some psalm of unbridled seltzer
stinging the eyes like sweat reprises
placenta—Suckling cigarettes later, it’s
all resolved in a
distant buzzsaw soughing the song of the mogwai,
sawdust shinnying thicker than cigarette
smoke unspools in scintillant fog, soft
cherries sucked plumper than
stars weaned away from the
gnashing night, the
delighted expanse of a
cherry’s light hereby vying
to scumble or muzzle the sun; what
gremlins attuned to distorting the
scars and the starlight into a
litter of spit-swoln cigarette filters
bivouacked over the ass of McConnell’s
boils now girded with crepitant rails and
all but arthritic box trucks bulging,
reckoning Urizen’s endgame clear
as a cigarette settles an upset
stomach—
