I went
to the courtesy clinic,
     where I converted
my curdling sweat
           into cigarettes,
  rotgut scotch from the
  maw of a folgerphone, those
    shingles stapled with
    gum-colored smegma,
             springs reformed
         to a scowling pallet, and
                             cereal milled
         from coho salmon and grosgrain.

                                                            My cat
(the little adorable derring-do dandy dandling darling)
said something akin to, in Yiddish, Who’s
        a girl got to fuck
        for some snake meat,
and duly implored the door to creak.
She was always a little bit grass-sick, that one.
  
                                                                  That Sycamore
there on High
and Smill St.,
bald and pale as some steel-cut country surgeon
                         cagily telling his son
                            that Old Yeller was pregnant,
                  sprawled like a cross of camargue
upended,
     elbowing chins
          of this stalwart wall that solely’d
                   stood to exaggerate
                      sleepy hills the city
                                   had, days ago,
                                             taken,
                                        forsaken, and
                                             seized amidst puzzling
                                                                            ruffles of
                                                                                      concrete—
         (bow of a whale rib thrust, unwound, unwrinkled,
                  the murmurous paneling pinned in Gigi’s den,
                             this weeping musk of prosecco soured
                                          and glib as a shriveling oil slick)
         reaches forth forever to scrawl some sloppy star in the
jowls of a prowling
       sun, forevermore bellying
               yellowing, on the lam,
                   congested fugue of a reprimand runnied,
                   a soft-boiled egg compelled to assuage
          the throat of old Jupiter Morgan open,
          that sumptuous surge of suppling grubs
          that stormed his pregnant paunch
          so thinly imprisoned—
                                                                               And then
the valets,
       who’d never read
          P. G. Wodehouse,
          leant upon shaded stands,
       who ran, it would seem,
                        as a penance,
       for what was a pittance,
                                a black-eyed child’s allowance,
                                  a pink-bellied toddler’s savings swept
in a wistfully trickling wellspring,
                                                         sapped,

that dapper mosquito resigned to unglamorous amber,
signing to passersby of what terrors beyond,
what terrors before or abroad,
          what wallflowers lost at the codfish ball. And

         O, what cars what turns of fortune forged and
                dandled and bobbed above bucking curs
                such treacly snickering keys, like
                stars rewired to speak
                                of untenable things, like
                somebody slurping up oily oceans whole,
              what souls some lick amid hips of an oyster,
              cars like cloisters cramping a cult for one,
              wan mitre and censer cocked
              like a boa some whistling striptease saws
                    on the backs of brittlely queasy knees,
              like tire marks swell in the ermined train of a peafowl.

                                                              And here,
beholden to everyone,
inchoate Woyzeck moans
like sizzling sea foam,
fair and anemic heir of atlas
wiggling bones of a tyrant’s throne
and chalice chucked at a hobbling skomorokh.