There are things you don't know :

I-IV-V ⁷

Bare red lightbulb strobing the bathroom like

Perfume caught in a sweater

Ring cloud of gall gnats at the back door

350 + 440Hz dialtone I can't won't shake

   At another moment it was

"A Casinha Pequenina" (

Tommy was singin' it, he could

Get up like a girl on those high notes

   That was one where you floated in, I couldn't stop it

Lord, the populators of dreams . . .

 

   What else . . .

   Have kept busy

Collecting books on famous fighters | snakes, escapes

Whaling records, penitentes  |  grottoes, bees, & mesmerists

Vernacular musicks, feats of great strength

Acrobats & Mountebanks

Hyatt's oral history of hoodoo

Opera Horatii

Ananga-Ranga     Karpuradi-Stotra

A text by Amsden called Navaho Weaving

Idiophones & puppets  |  a concertina, a kalis sword

An ikon of Bosko, a Baining night mask

 

            preoccupied with finance & theater

                          else with ordinary vessels :

                          a cup or can or shoe

   But mostly just talking

from an unreal mouth the whole time  |  I was lost

in my evening jacket  

fifteen years I wear it every day & think

do you fit the same dress pulled up over your knees

as the earth draws back like so much ice simply it gives up

 

   I could get language amended 

now that remissly I have itself observed 

now that I possess more functional words 

& no longer rely on harsh repetitions

or perturbations

   We kept

the room largely barren (there was that single pornographic image you admired

which we tried to reënact     :     long lean party downstairs too busy for utterance

& strangely, even then, mired in the surface of a catholic disposition

I should have said less, stood & laughed at the same jokes

but for some obscure "amongst . . .

                                                         burned worse than the erysipelas

& in writing from above, suffered vertigo

   Let's say I forgot to open a channel out into the human ideal

(on the one hand being otherworldly     :      on the other, "framing-device

still I am clean like the thinnest shiv edge would be

& often outside myself

               pure as per ritual, What else

 

 

 

I worry things (some

Who dissected the first corvid in the Ozarks?

Who performed the amanuensis?

What had that hand held? Meaning, maybe . . .

If meaning were structure, concrescence, or anthem

All of

 

& in thir glory & in thir cost