(duchamp’s response upon 

 cassius asking him just 
 to contort a black 
 velvet portrait of old 
 Hank Clay out of elmer’s glue and
 seventeen-hundred-and-seventy-five blue 
 dwarven sandstone colts run ragged in
 vying to tie 
 up one pitiful 
 run of the 
 knight’s tour—all
 in one breath now) spoilt
 
meditations abound in the boils as
squiters scream, ad astra, it’s
blasphemy, pipe dreams—see
 
the cashiers whose names remain still
some sad poet’s sore and lordly handle, 
harboring tepid green 
gossip drawn to the 
grin of an olio 
slowly unfolding in                      kudzu,
riddled with swoln morning glories in-
flamed with the mudflap prospect tatters-
all wallflowers cud amongst quiet 
critiques, the creaking neck of the
mayor bent whipping a chain-
bound bowling ball through bottle-
necked bus stops cobbled from
wallowed-out ear bones; noise
once sluthered up under the soul, Stan
Brakhage’s ping-ponged-pop-song-sort-of-
lottery foil-fleck rondo rollicking freely
as kids clipped chickenskin chain link free
from a sutured cut once, seventeen
times, now studded with
dominoed limestone shouldering
brushed steel rorschachs groping, a-
mong all the manifold meanings our
minds afford mere forms, no more than 
here now cold, uncrumpled, unquestioning 
horror—
 
            the treacly retreat of the
pollen percussing the fly’s-eyed 
cars caught cribbing the concrete
curves, the buck-toothed gold 
flake smoldering, laying its rot-
ten egg claim on a grave-
yard driveway, littered with
fingernail rubber and
rubbers resigned to play
squealing contortionist
sheep-shank poodle pup, peppering 
hesitant heaven’s hems with 
Japanese lilacs, grigs’ legs ground in 
how many mountainous pounds of hot brown
peanut butter petering free from the slack-
jawed smoke stack, cackling, thankless, 
hangry, digging its heels in the back of the
Ganges, vaguely
lamenting a bodice of
caution tape, caught toddling
off to play penitent fence-
post gracing the mad-libbed 
ribs of unraveling 
heaven’s gate grown 
orange and red and 
black as a blister bug 
boyishly mocking some
mismanaged coral snake’s oddly
contorted, now autumnal, color-scheme, 
humbly, grumbling, trying
its hand at 
king—all the
 
woebegone indigo children entrained in an
arts-and-crafts house, staking their mood-
stone milk teeth into a buckle-bound building,
something that could’ve been
anything other than maybe
affordable housing crowned now
Vanderbilt’s Roman Bath House
Sound Clinic, once the place where
all of the art house arbiters coin-flipped
noise into music, here, now, swearing
what’s born of massaging a moaning
bowl should heal far more than any 
old noise that birds and poets entoil 
the static, miasmic, and gristle-licked air with