FIRST of the trumpeting smokescreens
playing shibari with tarp-smocked,
              knock-kneed cinderblocks
just on the edge of the pond
they’d whilom tilled to furnish a ball field,
cigarette
                      number three remembering
Haymarket fires and Zenith’s young Elmer Gantry
and everything gay and gray and vaguely
grim as deciduous misery—

wan reek of some somebody prodding
      a friable pile of smoldering diapers,
      blasphemous plastic picked
                to a licorice snakeskin
                echoing crepitant bends
       of the treacly Fremont sucked
       to a spluttering smudge,
like tar slung salving and suturing
bruised macadam,
       the gangrenous ache of congealing
asphalt
       scored with a viper’s tongue,
these scowling staves
            that grass seed
                       violently
                          elbows, throbbing
a torpid heart
                         against
                           glowering paddocks of
                         tantalum packed like
                           cackling pallets
                         exhumed from a ruinous Walmart’s spleen,
left stacked
       like snickering sedges dissembling
              cityscapes, sulkily
              greige as a sand flea
       cramped in a surf-licked keep—
some sucked-in skull and its teething
crenellate laurels slopped down a
shrunken scowl—left reading

                                              for rent.

Millie saw blood on the concrete,
called it a rorschach,
took it for lunch at Christie’s,
told old Rum Tum Thomathon Hoving,
              pale as the Washington Obelisk
              cocked above bickersome bog scum,
Say, it looks a bit like Plato, now, doesn’t it?

Plato cringed on the fringe of the finicky Lethe,
wormed beneath Rose and Vine St.,
shouldered the carcass of Donald Judd
as a whale as stale and pale as drug-smuggled horse cum,
dragged him up-over Mulberry Hill and the
gutters of Elm Tree, muttering
then and again
         and again,
Is this what you meant by
‘The winter is bleak.’
    ‘If somebody says it’s art, it’s art.’
        ‘Most art is fragile
     and some should be placed
   and never moved
away.’—
To think of it…,
                          froze before a disparaged lawn
                and the bones of a cankerous yew tree,
        shuddering shotguns slopped all
   pyrrole orange and
   phthalo green and
   quinacridone rose,
each sold for a Swiss-cheesed shipping container
some huckster’d stuffed with but butter-soft shillings
grown greener than gorse-eaten horse shit
       clabbering oat milk
                              set out to pasture,
                                           squeezed— and

then,
  
possessed with the devil’s mischief,
sowed sole-first this soulless hull of a shaper
to preen as an emulous stand of rebar,
mocking the knock-kneed trees and eaves,
and screamed,
                           through whistling teeth,

   I claim this land for Ancient Greece!

and though it recoiled and swelled against
canted brick
                       at the cantering clip of an Arabic
palfrey whipped with a chortling surge of obsidian
                                                   frothed to pahoehoe,

nobody seems to recall having heard it—

            Plato discovered a squealing Expo.

Studio Apartment,
                                 $900,  (water, gas, and sewage incl.)

Donald uncaps his pen
and tries to remember,
        with bleating brow,
        the soul of a circle,
        the shape of the Nao Victoria’s
prow impressed against curdling maps;

and somebody, elsewhere,
alien, scrapes an illumining
dollop of char they’d chipped
from a split and glistening joist
across wrinkling concrete, echoing
ginkgo leaves and the skirts of those
Balinese dancers prancing, tracing
                     a wild bequest of steps
and gestures churned
                     from an ancient trance.