There’s this strangely flesh-toned tape left suturing
crazing glass of the shell of a clam-dug Scub-Rats
                        elbowed a skull or so over on Main St.
              (over that sun-eaten sea nymph’s face still
               traced across wrinkling canvas, graven, offended,
               and simpering), coyly recalling
a frog conducting Mahler’s Sixth or something,
raising a gangly hand
to summon the slugs
  of a death march plundering stubborn Montmartre
   and bruising the Louvre to a floppily foppish saloon,
    and the arch awarded donned
     with a measure of drooling tule, the seams ripped
      reading,
                     Laissez les bons temps rouler!
                       available now
                           at Rally’s.

Grain-finished flowers
I’d never remember the names of
        dripping from slouching sills
and the sun still
                             svelte and freckled, blushing
the cherubic gold of the moon it’d usually scalded
blue and a sharply contracting black,
just some scarce hours shy of its
glower grown heavy and high enough, biting,
a rasp arced righting the new-chewn nails rough nights had
ruined, so hot and bothered it’s throttling scabs in the concrete—
slumberous muses rave as they
slip through the shades of Apollo’s pillars,
communing with frogspawn,
urging from squirming froth
some sizzling sailor’s song
interred among sea foam;

the feathering smile of sewage that skips across
pockmarked stone, the slumping firs who
woo and bewilder the dry-washed crows bent
gingerly combing the sky clean, twisted
street signs rambling, vine and woodland,
door rewritten again and again until
words refuse their illumining sinew;
Central, Park, Catalpa, Sycamore,
Limestone sucked to a puckering pulp,
the gravel no more than the dross of a dollop of
hardtack hacked through a powdery copse of
kelp that finicky, meek, and unwieldy
seas refused, marooned, and ruined,
wan plop of a groschen forged
from a rock-hammered bottle cap
snaps at the scratched and leaf-rasped throat
of a scrofulous public pool—
                                                                  a man
at a distance
                        slopped on an ebonied crutch, then
knelt and lowered a metal detector, chewing
a trowel through atoning roots for a sou
or a spoon or a tungsten ring some meddling
rook had abandoned, fixed in a twisted experiment;
then yet a man
                            with a hat like mine
removing the troubling trimmings from stunted shrubs;
a man with an emptied pram coercing a merciless
                            how d’you do;
the sky scrubbed
                            wan as a sandy gesso, and,
one more thing, before I punch the clock and
tickle the timpani taut as a teardrop, hugging
the chalk-wan cheek of a lacquered pall— just

children squealing and scuttling like
cartoonish soap bubbles brushed from Jumbo, Jr.,
tickling streets to a shameless, ageless, easy and teasing smile