the nonplussed mullioned window’s maw,

a black hollyhock shot through a shriveling iris,
fawn-brown petals now crimped into cringing brick
bent shouldering what little indigo seaglass brow bulged
                                billowing over a sun-swoln stoma, a
                                shrill little sandglass gorget, torpid
                             Jesus fish congealed in a kiss
                         to recall a broad, 
          wax-wrapped cough drop 
candy clot, verdigris green as the canopy
harboring triangle park, with its 
                      puffer-stuffers, its 
steeplechase lance brand cracker packages stacked, 
all teetering scattershot alphabet 
blocks for the transients trammeled
              in yawning shop fronts, 
              two curled spalls
              of card stock floundering 
gingerly over a scratched steel table top, twinned,
and the both of them gaily recalling,
                    in captions shouldering 
                    thomas kinkades, great proverbs 
of dead-headed discipline,
tenuous germs of spare the rod and
spoil the corn sugar hog slops; just
 
scarce paces past, a sparrow splayed
tits up, pressed up brass-flat, froze thrashing at
keening haze and a verdigrised sky and a 
half-eaten apple beside it, sliced,
and nary a bitemark despite all its ambering facets—
an emerald-cut brick of velveeta demurred
by our swollen and darling star, just
 
fodder for all of the curb-hopped cars,
the sidewalk’s meanly leisuring sentries—
 
what green reek of weed-whacked mint 
dismembers it
into no more than an itch at the elbow,
memories darker than 
blood sponged up from a 
Holstein, glibly
absconded with age, or
allayed alone by the gristly wanderlust
maybe, or ousted across which witless line,
what mortar-white road line logic, 
by what the good doctor or deadbeat dad deemed 
merely a shapeless insanity
graven as any old slippery name
assuaging the blighted boxwoods, 
hemlocks, chestnuts, chinkapins, sassafras,
grass blades—dryads and naiads and huldras
ad nauseam
 
 
MORAL: you can outlaw poverty easy as squeezing  
a spare roll of pennies clean over an iron-caulked doorsill,
                            trying to feed all the neighborhood cats
left scratching up oxford shirts
on a simpering laundry line;
you can outlaw poverty
easy as raising an errant eye
from an ambulance crashed through a
Playskool triage, as easy as, how
does it go now, pulling the
camel back out of the ass
of the bodkin bared and
disseminating camel meat or something;
is camel meat water-logged, you think,
is it more of an aspic?