Are You Ready, Mary Baker Eddy???
Bill Knott and James Tate
Cloud Marauder Press (1970)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The University Abandoned Overnight
Ode to Desire's Dumptruck
Atlantis
And Behold the Blue Planet Steeped in its Dream
Ode to E. A. Poe
Like Cocoons on a Whip
Hymn to Beauty
Poem
Sports Page
You Never Step in the Same River Once
Ode to Melancholy
Ode to Joy
Answer to Darwin Marx and Freud
Washing Up
Cretan Holiday
Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Gatorade
Look-out on Flip-top Mountain
More Wind
Diane Linkletter Haikus
Poem
Poem (tollbooths)
The Tony Perkins Sunflower Sutra
Poem (petition)
The Yodelling Eraser
Advice to a Young Poet
Ode to Autumn
THE UNIVERSITY ABANDONED OVERNIGHT
They all left one night a few years ago,
I don't know why. I hear rumors, haunted, etc.
I guess I'm the only guy that comes here now.
Sometimes I see Phillip Larkin ride by
on his bicycle and say:
"Dead wind tonight."
The wind picks up the fallen type from the ground
and glitters it through
the sanitary ivy.
This is the University abandoned overnight.
What called them away?
The bells keep ringing for the classes:
I go from the gymnasium to the Science Plaza
to the Creative Writing Ballroom
where the sherry is still sinking in the thimbles.
The wind still thinks it is lifting skirts
and says to itself:
"These skirts are getting shorter and shorter . . .
Where will it end?"
A ladle still rests in the front row seats
where the girls' thighs shined new light
on the twenty-seven flavors of amnesia.
Beneath all the cement of the Student Union
there is preserved in tinfoil
one drop of blood
from the virgin coed who underwent
the first Immaculate Orgasm here.
I'm getting depressed.
I don't get credits for this course.
This is the University abandoned overnight,
a perfected and necessary legend.
There's the janitor, the campus cops,
there's the drinking fountain,
the class-cards, the puddles of chalk,
the posters announcing the seminars
of the straw raindrop.
This is the biggest University in the world,
the angelic mummers' pistolwhipped garden.
ODE TO DESIRE'S DUMPTRUCK
Cue balls have invented insomnia
in an attempt to forget eyelids.
The wind is a see-through sexual organ
of indeterminate gender.
Young Aphrodite, the immaculate aspirin,
has Wednesdays and Saturdays off
from the ultra-dodo.
She practises her evolutionary stages
at the bus terminal of
illegible commas. A rollcall
runs through her veins and
empties Idaho hair into
the lips of the hammer.
Curly hair. Or hair which
grows out of the scalp
and then grows into the shoulders
about an inch from Tennyson.
ATLANTIS
First paint the sides of a fishtank black.
Then take a green and tan bas-relief map of the USA and place it
on the bottom of the tank.
Fill it up with water and wisps of seaweed.
Have the spectators look down into the tank.
AND BEHOLD THE BLUE PLANET STEEPED IN ITS DREAM
The Vietnamization of the Vatican will continue
a new television series based on the continental drift
like catching Diane Linkletter on the first bounce,
her face a spoofed moonscape
beneath Stalin's birthday helicopter;
the embodiment of a downpour of crosshairs
will be the culture hero that we grill.
Your real life is a metaphor of your cancelled magazine subscription
like the girl who hides her beauty and pretends to look for it
she's getting warmer,
she's getting warmer, now she's so near her beauty
that it melts into the deserts between zoos
that are the zodiac of the first and last volcanic lozenge.
This concludes the Dear Abbey finger-tickle handshake snow.
I predict that the Spanish Armada will supply
all of Robert Graves' gumballs.
I predict that in the cellar my mother's home-made preserves
will perform obscene acts.
The vomit's diving-mask,
the eleven-fingered toe
and the inaudible bomb of the last valentine;
the white hand that came out of nowhere left a red glove
over your flamboyant envelope of stewardesses.
The lightning that sleeps in pairs perches on your roots
and bites a ruby's semaphor of touch
with which the ebbtide deciphers our scars.
Who to this ode?
A sperm's outflung arms scream,
the depth-charge of perfume
offers us to" the pneumatic coatlapels of dawn's conversation
with the spasmelodic mirrors.
The basement candy of landscapes evanesces
like an invitation to transworld lifebouys
She never really comes like the pepsi comes
like the comet undresses backwards so as to imprison the phallic desert
where old theater curtains are impaling silence
with the backlash of fishbone
The mound of Venus smokestack spirits from the sands
the remains of a trenchcoat that has a Sunday Chronicle glory
I never knew her cigarette papers
her ass's subway of insects
was a crystal palace to the bone
upon the cinders of nets of facelessness.
Where the oceanfloor dawns in your hair
with the knife's chain-reaction of frogs
brush the closets from your wrists.
Am I alive in the transparency you wear at your throat
or am I dead in the sandgrain that floods the sun
with your hungerstruck mountainpeaks of stillborn foxes.
ODE TO E. A. POE
You wrote your last poem on the tracing-paper inside my womb
the ink recoiled from your fingertips
and my head melted from your sextant
the ague of your housing project . . .
Now we are floating in the exile of your groundhugging kiss
memorizing the perhaps through the earthquake's keyhole,
your temples pulse like the first plane from the conspiracy,
the raw lightbulb where we the poor jetsetters of a needle's eye
telephone our faces to the look-alike-contest of love
which no one ever wins
except your acropolyptic ice-cracks.
The lake walks on us,
the whirlpool fingerprints us,
the wind poses us for the mug-shots of lava.
Can we rendevous in the polevaulter's cage of avalanche of madonnas
before my wedding to the odyssey of wound-tonal ballparks?
RSVP after the end of time
by pulling the flower-ripcord inside the fountain of head-on collisions
where an eclipse's skeleton is born each time I aim my yesterday's initials
polar bear
Nietzsche was caught yesterday shaving a horse in Torino
Are you on my birth's casualty list
or do we have nothing to talk about?
After the leaves fall from the marquee
the sky lighted by indirect birdcalls will exhume us
from the tire-tracks of the fun-machine
fuck millionaires
Do your stingrays coincide with the little place called The Willow
LIKE COCOONS ON A WHIP
The way the world is not
Astonished at you
It doesn't blink a leaf
Leads me to grok
That beauty is natural unremarkable
And not to be spoken of
Except in the course of things
The course of dreams or worksharing
The course of squeezes or neighbors
The course of you tying back your raving hair to go out and shop
And the course of course of me
Astonished at you
The way the world is not
HYMN TO BEAUTY
No need to even open my eyes, eat the bloody thing,
it falls like kindergarden on my shoes.
The walkie-talkie Nero works at the filling-station
with a cradle-grave full of plastic raincoats.
Euphoria slumped over the controls of your paint-by-number wishbone
I have to cross the country on a tropical vagina
and the minutehands coagulate while the last neologism sleeps it off
It is particularly important to be relaxed at the start breaking windows
you all know the story of the other woman
the island created when everyone's fingertips
touch everyone else's
There is no stopping this Ode to Beauty
for example the rows of shoes surrounding an empty lighthouse
because of the pillbox when her eyelids clovered her body
when night lifted its lamp from our caterpillar of oilslicks.
Always remember that day precedes day
but night follows night
and that your hands are microscopes for pencils to look through.
You blaze me in your hair,
you open your veins like roads that re fuck death,
you rip highways from the starfish
your wine covers the moon with untameable hair-dos
you blow bubblegum through my pores
up to the secret decoder-ring of the sickle-bird.
I got two left hands
so rearrange your parts accordingly.
Lift up the rock-and-roll and watch me slither out
The snowflakes are locked-up in the ballet,
I'm on a diet of hymens
I need a mask for my buttonholes to see through
when they carry me bareback through the dream-riddled parascopes.
The day Rodin's Thinker stopped thinking and said:
"God, it gives me the willjes
to stand alone in your eustachian tubes all night
and to walk down the corridor of the snow being drawn-and-quartered
because the whinnying-wet carresses of the sequin-armpits
are two storms which tiptoe hand in hand
through the tables and chairs stacked up against the waterfall."
Who is at the blind ticket-window?
Her scarf is a musical instrument
which picks through the garbage cans
to find the smuggler of amputations.
And it doesn't matter what the thankyou amputates
Indigo
The twin-woman who is Beauty
whose ankle-chain is the ditch-tongue of my smokesignal bones,
if only mouthwash could talk
she's make a grave of the air for your information.
POEM
The man who got trapped in the cave behind the waterfall
shouted and shouted for years
nevertheless the only one who can rest on his laurels
is a closet attacking a landscape
SPORTS PAGE
Up until now I have been known as the poet of love,
from now on I would like to be known
as the poet of mental illness.
Theres a little story I always tell about this poem:
my brother caught me running moonshine to Paul Valery,
leaning forward in the stockcar race of the blind
God, that's a great line!
Isn't it?
Well I rode my Harley I rode my Harley I rode my Harley
and I rode my Indian too.
Maxine Black, the night-nurse, could piss over a car
and not get a drop on it,
especially if Pat Nixon was at the wheel.
The manhole countries seceding from the clit-trap of solitary confinement
lieing on a tightrope
spelled EVIL backwards
so that the stones of the castle haven't come to rest yet
I eat them like some people eat hangars.
Statues are dead until they start to crumble
at the rate of an ICBM's hiccups -financial imbalance, the watusi, the twist
osmosis selected at random
from your garder's birthday kiss.
The train faints on the figure-eight piano keys
Well, she's an anti-Medusa
One look and you lose your harden.
Is it farther if we travel by the glass-bottomed harikari
to the aquarium's melting door
where we are abandoned in little baskets every night -the maternal flame-thrower,
bring a round casket of the smoke-rings you've swallowed.
The castration of the sphinxs was quietly underway
as I rejoined the flagellants inside their seashell.
Why was I imprisoned in this figurine sunset
with the initiates of the steamroller
calling me from the jugular snows of lost December 8, 1943?
With the bas-relief pineneedles of my face
I am going to betray the upsidedown-smile of ballerinas
if all the ballerinas would menstruate at once
I would set sail in a boat
as frail as the leaves that fall from tears
on Manhattan's inner-shore.
I lay down a bunt in your groin
YOU NEVER STEP INTO THE SAME RIVER ONCE
The ancient octopus floating in earth's liquid core
whose arms burst through the ground as trees
as though a thousand spinal fusions
lit the lazard-beam in a nutshell
except for the necklace of fury slaps
in whichever time-zone
is death at the present moment.
I drove my neck into the ground
with the words they extracted
from a silent movie. The lightning
took off its pajamas and running away
left footprints of stained-glass
that tells the story of
the raising of the dead
into your binoculars
of transparent nightgown.
Does Gerry Malanga live here?
What's your position on Gerry Malanga?
Do you think a twelve-tone waterfall
will ever walk down the same street
as Gerry Malanga?
What's Gerry Malanga's phone number?
Have you ever spoken with Gerry Malanga?
You're probably wondering why I'm so interested
in Gerry Malanga.
The answer is false orgasm no. 394.
The turquoise bodystocking landscape.
Do you believe in sperm?
No.
Insulted by a foetus, how can I go on?
Like the end of the second act of Checkov's The Three Sisters,
The youngest sister is all alone;
she's masturbating, and when she comes
she yells out: "Moscow! Moscow!"
Ditto Boston.
ODE TO MELANCHOLY
No no don't twist Wolfgang,
the pennywhistle of your silva thin regret.
La Guernica is my Madonna with Child.
How about Dante cut with speed?
How about the nosedrops of solid silver?
August Stramm did not die underwater.
Lord, the summer was mostly grotto,
knocked us on our ass.
We went back further than we had foreseen improbably,
the shit of Ming Dynasty.
Dora Sherwood (914) CR 1 8563
Your cross-reference My Lais,
your goof-ball
as blinking is necessary
else the eye would ulcerate
the world-eye doesn't need my brief life.
The mouth abandoned in the middle of a confession.
The escape routes
have just surrendered puberty.
Why was I appointed defense attorney
when I no longer know how to
finger Candy Darling.
The human form is still recognizable
until you get about half-way down,
the first discrepancy is
you get murdered
cameo dew
the next line is invisible
The package containing the bar of soap
also contains instructions on how
to use it to kill
the dead in their breachborn comet.
Faces go blank when asked a face-question.
Night and day exchange priests,
the torpor of Vatican gism.
You are walking between the vineyard and the sea,
a young wine teething on your ribs,
your beauty splashes through cement,
I caress the clusters of sweat,
your eyelids of dismembered pollen.
I'm Wolf Man and I'm howling.
Each time I blink will outlive me.
The sun tunes its rays to the chords
of your shadow, your hair
like summer stakes all its gold
on one throe.
Alexander the Great was no pineapple.
How many orgasms did the ha-ha have today?
Your jellyfish cadillac gummed
my heartburn. The oscilloscope pulsed
along the horizon, the rainbow's
coughdrops vomited a candle of
peanutbutter.
We inhale the dancers through
our shipwrecked skingraphs.
The eternity in my left wrist is no longer
the same as the instant in my right wrist,
although, as Marx said, the bellybutton
will wither away after crawling
though the eye of the rollercoaster,
clutching my diploma from Clark Kent University
Piss off Melancholy!
Mild mannered Bill Knott goes into
the telephone booth
comes out as Lois Lane,
a minutehand's blood shatters
the forget-me-motes.
The permeate people during the nightly airraids
of glaciers when we evacuate our dreams
according to how many times
the lion blinks
before dropping what's left of you
and going to the waterhold of dice.
Where we're strangling the captain
so he can remain gregarious
so we can skeletonize at will the
plantation's last match
the snowmobile in death's ravine breathes
dragonfly-architecture
the starter's gun interrupted
inertia's circus
whose legs we love to slowly tear off.
ODE TO JOY
My tongue in her asshole pulled the pin
from the grenade the bandstand
ponyride into the official boyscout
manual where the alphabet
is rearranged according
to the stop and go lights inlaid
in the floors of zoo cages
which foilow her night and day
through the new mass medias
constantly being shed amid
sparks from her shoulderblades
I cannot swallow.
The spinal fusion taps at the
window of blank pennies
it does this to help me use up
the last three words from the wordlist
in my lightning-rod.
Everyone born between roulette wheels
because they are gauze
butterflies in the potent machine.
Nightclubs are doomed,
I feel it in my blood.
A beaker that contains the
even-numbered waves,
the fountain and fable heads rushed up
a fire-escape of running-green mascara.
This poem is an acrostic
containing the names of
fingerless scanscionists: or
songs of the colostomy.
The May-December perversions
will never reach us in time
to be saved.
Some aspics are hairy
but the mouth of a mask
will never replace a cow's tail
in my sugarbowl.
This is how I spent my time
at Charlie Manson's Paradise Resort:
refining headaches,
sifting them purer and purer,
like the mist in the mirror
held over her cuntlips.
I peel the petals of the nightclub
on the beach dissolving into
acres of the newborn lampshade.
I walk the drum-soaked streets,
the air still warmed from the
passage of suicides
cools the opaque calendar
Hello Dolly.
Questions we were about to paste
to the handlebars of a drowning
no longer receiving severence pay
from the Wisconsin Nymphette League.
My left eye is on a collision course
with my right eye in the
treetops of butter.
If I hate it more than you
it is because you are not trying
at Rick's Cafe L'Americain.
ANSWER TO DARWIN, MARX AND FREUD
His name is still the game although it's not the same
His eyes were the color of the sun when it's gone
His skin was covered with the roads he had run
He tried to sell his soul to the zoo
All you yous
You are whose
Not mine
Not mine
I'm not Thingmane
I'm a peaceful man but if cornered will fuck you
Mouseketeer Annette, lie down
Why do we have to fuck in this jar of formaldehyde
I recommend 3000 pushups on an icepick before you go to bed
There are no peacenicks in the potatopatch
There are no atheists on the frontlines
There are no atheists in sex
Still one could do worse than be a swinger of bitches
Who poisoned my mittens
As when the whip forgave its powderpuff
This poem sentences me to life
With totempoles of limp vacuums
When you feel a breeze you know the dead are looking at you
They removed from the cage of shadows
A pair of tweezers that got bigger
The further you threw them away
It's a dirty SOS that nobody rescues
Or if they do their amputated lips are sold to lost caves
The man scalped by toilet paper
Is reproduced in your actual size
And can be sprayed on when you most need it
When you are about to straddle a volcano
I was best man at the wedding of rat poison and weed poison
Now you can lock me up and throw the tears away
Loving you is like backing into a black velvet nutshell
To find death asleep in the corner
Reading your lifestory
But if you keep a stopwatch on your dyings
Soon you'll have them down to nothing flat
Like a divingboard for comatose pilgrams
Like a divingboard sharp enough to perform
Transexual operations just by thinking about it
Night comes like the withdrawal symptoms of satin
Sawing its way out through zebras
And into the rifle's unconscious
WASHING UP
Washing up is mending fragrances,
the greatest mystery of them all
is what kind of underwear
hermaphrodites wear.
Do you ever sit next to Jules Laforgue
in the movies, his windshield-wiper
kept getting into your popcorn.
Tell, do you always use the foreceps
when you wash dishes?
And why does it make you blush
when I ask you the question
Who is the Broadway Joe Namath of poets?
Now that a sleeping-capsule
no longer owns the rights to your lifestory,
please leave this notice for the ambulance-men:
Never mind delivering tomorrow's gypsy.
CRETAN HOLIDAY
The captain of the ship liked me best.
We drank ouzo on the starboard at six bells.
I said, "Whaddaya call this ocean anyway, Drugstore?"
It comes if you call it
Like a raspish fig. "Well, let's get
down to business," I said,
thinking of my stockbroker ancestors
who had bought and sold Greece a thousand times
with red longjohns peeking from beneath the waves' pants.
"You see that sun," I said,
"I've got a summerhouse there
in the chest-hairs of the bouzoki child,
raining rapid-fire handkerchiefs,
fucking Homer pigeons,
the night of the festival I lost my legendary cookies.
What did that moustache cost you?"
But few things could have been more beautiful than the
Art Collection in my aluminum wallet.
It's one thing to be rich, it's another thing to be within
the star-lit sweatband of Artemus'
empty quiver.
Crete is more like Cincinnati than Dubuque,
as Ingram Merrill once said to the masseuse
of shadowless still-lifes.
Every instant there washes upon these shores
photographs of nape-lifters,
dairies of randy tennis-matches,
fire-eating carnations
and my friend's last round-trip laundry ticket,
the ventriloquated breath
of the fragmentary beachboys.
This ship is full of geniuses,
Mark Strand, Senator Maximus, Anthony Quinn,
Tallulah Bankhead, the Lone Ranger of the 47th
Street Turkish Bath, Nicki Borpolis- "small but
well-sculpted" -Galen Williams, William Jay
Smith and the ghost of Theodore Roethke in drag.
Here comes Holly Stevens, whooops!
LINES COMPOSED A FEW MILES ABOVE GATORADE
Why do kamikazes have to die
Beat me on the beach continued
Refers to the vestigial moss that covered everyone's nipples at that time
Because just as the ocean 1s surrounded by its drowned
The blink lies still
While being examined by sleep's shrapnel
The clock's ghosthand of pearled fingerfucks
Knows this better than anyone
Often her elbows were as gluey as a life spent on a trampoline
The sound made by a stabbed glove
The sound made by a stabbed perch
Asking a stampeed for a semicolon to end all semicolons
From which the bitter lampshades
that resisted our births successfully
Tossed purple capsules to the stockmarket's cesspool
Of green fire and diamonds
During the treetop seance of vertigo blowjobs
She seemed listless and troubled
Spittle gapes at my beauty
Of soft hotels
Starlight's pink fangs drifting
A breeze's tuning-fork of tongues
Which have lavished me upon me
Which have swallowed my hole
That correnate by bursting
Buzzsaw is wine to ankles
Two darvon in every dogstyle reliquary
Like being drunk by that ancient sect The Lasers of Mercy
So that you standing at the bottom of my dream
Could shower your love on the spiders
Quaking in your own dream
Which is over suddenly and forever
If you ever see a starlet sucking a licence plate
It's cluttering up the manhole
We plan to emerge from later this evening
A corkscrew of latent bonfires
Or the flowers of basketcases
Which is carving all the other snowflakes
Like an iceberg that has sunk the thirteenth floor of every building
Where I sit holding my cock
Wishing it were a slowly gouged out mirror
LOOK-OUT ON FLIP-TOP MOUNTAIN
Sho-ju
in snow
belly-otter drifts
I take rugged piss on
yak's tooth
Storm brewing in
lumberjack
nudist-camp.
The horse/snowflake
down the trail meditating
on hangnail
Forsook clippers
for rice-burger
waves waves
How the hell do you put up this pup-tent?
Chipmunks leave berries
in my navel-sutra.
4:29 AM Guggenheim grant.
Who would know
if I burned down
this whole forest?
Karma quiver!
Why did Buddha cross the road?
to seize the geek pop-stand.
MORE WIND, N'EST-CE PAS?
The rivers the
shadows the·stones of the mute
shoes hanging in the elevator the submarine
full of snow
starts off with a map of pity
where the aliases are dying
I'm opening
up
the line in this poem
send me the bill
fleur-wind
for the blank disguises of the dice
the bees' cigarettes grow limp
in the clocked night
the flags of plenty and the flags of famine
drift across the staircase of eggwhites
if only
I had not written
these words this
poem would be perfect.
DIANE LINKLETTER HAIKUS
I.
You walked across your own tongue,
a cancelled airport,
simmer of packaged eclogues.
II.
Bluebearded-landscape-ledge-child
Over the sideroar;
Rib-worlds mounted her; touch it.
III.
The Intimate Journals of
Diane Linkletter
olive oil and pop-eyed sand.
IV.
The Chattanooga footblues,
a cup of wishing
tubes almost to convince wham!
V.
Do not go gentle into
that ha-ha; whiteman
Speak with forked cock; Warhol Films.
VI.
Such as to herself at
Last Eternity
Throws her; the mayor's snow-removal program.
VII.
I'd like to reverse the charges
for this cobra.
VIII.
The pure amateurs are dead.
Beyond the wreckage
the gift that's meant to be cracked.
IX.
It's an aura lacking enough
sub-blood photographs
or else not-moments punched-out
POEM
First, cover yourself completely with chameleons.
Then walk down the street lingering to talk to those you know.
The one - if any - who realizes you are covered with chameleons
is your enemy.
The one who recognizes you as Greta Garbo is your lover.
POEM
An evening-gown worn by tollbooths when they feel
maudlin about the traffic lights
Fell on me
What is this evening-gown worn by tollbooths when
they feel maudlin about the traffic-lights
Doing falling on me I angrily cried upwards
THE TONY PERKINS SUNFLOWER SUTRA
Fuck you Tate I want to write a poem to Candy Bergen.
Let's install a plotwhich is your best profile
hydroelectric dam or slashed wrist?
The waterlily's sledgehammer eyes clung to Dubuffet,
I am a flower whose petals
are statues of Candy Bergen (knott).
My shoes are powered by his lisp!
The stars are Candy's nipple-rouge.
I met him on the Via Veneto,
he was melancholy for hamburger stanza-breaks.
The net that catches sleepwalkers in the middle of the butterfly
is the cave of escaped movies
where the faithless ice-cream cones of the cliff
are tracer-bullets for our bamboo speed beacons.
This is the first of many Tony Perkin's Sunflower Sutras,
this is the sound of a penny turning green
in a hurricane's forehead.
The cracks in the sidewalk take us by the hand
and lead us through the uprooted flashlights
of Trakl's cock.
Her hair is a waterfall of matchboxes
Candy I love you
Tony you never write.
POEM
The wind blew a piece of paper to my feet.
I picked it up.
It was not a petition for my death.
THE YODELLING ERASER
The yodelling blackboard has two seasons: mauve and movie
The yodelling sliderule comes back from the w.c. it is blue all over
as if it had come face to face with
The yodelling massacre living on a stream-of-consciousness doll
in all the best restaurants where
The yodelling astronauts exchange urine-tracked kisses
on tha yodelling rocket known as the small of the back.
The yodelling Zerocrat unlike the Democrat believes in scenic venom.
The yodelling figurines ride the thimbly children across yodelling skewered eyebrows
where they are melted by a 21 hiccup salute.
The yodelling amnesia caresses the blowgun face of the crowd.
The yodelling crowd is revealed to be a Siamese pentagram including everyone but me.
The yodeling scrapbook of my mother's medicine cabinet has cured the stranglers
surrounding a haiku.
The yodelling mask of teeth crosses its legs around the neck of inherited mortuary
syringes of a dollarbill's last wishes.
The yodelling papyrus skiff takes off suddenly for Pluto to do the mambo
with the chronic maps of lost revelations
inside the Holy Ghost's glacial moustache
which places the complete echoes of the world
in a glancing blow from the fatal waiting list
which is so long it reaches into the womb
and tickles the snowflake which is carving all the other snowflakes
into a statue of a trigger
which fertilizes the elephantitis of rocks.
The yodelling blind who divide their lives into dark and dark crustacean baseball movies.
The yodelling Pope embellishes his profile in three squirts of dead end.
The yodelling cunelinguist airport runs away with the yodelling tapeworm
into the mouse-dark sea of the Safety Belt.
The yodelling rainbow (which, according to the Old Testament, God placed over the world
so that he might remember to milk the spam for all his fans out there in mirrorland)
forgets to whiplash the raven's pet zodiac with the ballerina of sutures.
The yodelling second feature has eyelashes of solid crater.
The yodelling Rings of Saturn are peanutbutter upon the frozen peepingtoms
who stare from magazines like a guarantee of lifelong appendicitis
The yodelling roadmap popcycle rides through prisons for the sane, and prisms
for the deaf bark whose spacesuit is a waterfall
where ants are hollowed out to hide the swimmingpool elongated into a vampire
(you can only swim in them between noon and neon).
The yodelling pineapplelightning deflowers you when you most expect it.
The yodelling zootsuit collapses at the speed of hyenas whipping their tails
across the cannabalistic meter of an oxygen tank.
The yodelling foam is spread over the stones skipping across the mouthroofs
of the young and yodelling gasmasks.
ADVICE TO A YOUNG POET
They left the fucking shells on the
almonds in my hershy bar.
Enclose a self-addressed tattoo
of your mother bending over with a match
to light one of her
home-baked farts.
ODE TO AUTUMN
The coed steps out today and says
O it's October and Autumn is coming on
I think I'll go blow Galway Kinnell.
Autumn is like the day after moving day,
we walk through our house amazed at its size,
aligned with the hope
that when they capture Moshie Dayan
they rape-sodomize him.