Were I involved in this matter
in any direct way, I would comment
on the medieval figure in its wizard hood,
the seeming caftan hanging below
its arms, the bare toes clutching
the tiny box, balancing for life, and the wires
that rhizome from the fingers, wryly unattached
to any power source. Tonight we missed the last
episode of Friends, and must bid farewell by proxy
to the fantasy of airy and affordable Manhattan
apartment space. In the labored sarcasm, the
unforeseen juxtaposition of planes and polished shadows,
the pointed periods, I feel rumbling in my bowels
the inner gears of the world’s machinery,
the modes of production that produce the tree,
the true, the beautiful, the country and city,
nature, and you and me. A table of periodic
sentences. Landscape a painting behind sashed
glass. The air the men breathed, it has been estimated,
had by the third day circulated through
some two hundred pairs of lungs. Lunges.
A drop in tone, so I may speak in my own
voice, or one that bears the marks I associate
with me: Oh! for the carefree life of the pirate!
the salt spray humming in the rigging, the jolly
roger, flintlocks and cutlasses, buggery and bandanas!
Sing an accountancy chantey, ranking you debits
in one column, your credits in another, pierce
the mist of green trunks and feathered leaves
surrounding the glassed-in study, and grasp
the thing itself, the irreversible crawl of data
beneath the nipples of the bland announcer.
Watch the pretty newsreader take off her clothes
as she recites the headlines. “Supersize me,
baby,” says Bob Dole. A series of tabular
definitions. Yellow birds make forays from the grapefruit
tree, and leathery men sell the Homeless Voice
at the light. My tongue in your ear is politics.
It is a beautiful thing, you know, a vast, all-encompassing
parent that gives and gives, eats and grows stronger
on whatever particolored, heterogeneous fare the streets
and hollers might evacuate onto its plate. A serious
deformation. My tongue in your rear is poetry.