Bloated auto-mechanic, specializing in the engines of the few Rabbits Volkswagen has left on this earth to fall into the wise hands of your garage

With a floral bouquet sputtering forth from their exhaust pipes and the sound of a Beetle in second gear,

Ella’s voice gives your ears a greater challenge. “Why did a woman with such a beautiful voice not enter a convent?” you wonder as you mix up the ends of a set of jumper cables

And cook two small batteries out behind the garage in a field where vagrants sleep, the smoke revealing your error.

Vito is always making vegetable drinks and giving out balloons to the thin, well dressed pie-makers

Whose long robes drown out the loud music playing in the garage,

The crullers they bring by and leave on your doorstep before any staff members arrive in the morning drier than a pint

Of pom-pom girls’ frowns, but as pretty as a flower grown in a neighborhood garden.

Linden Larouche swings his key chain around on a ship’s deck and accidentally brakes your collarbone

Like a Russian mastiff that farts on a rock

But claims that the predicament he is in was laid at his feet by out of work clowns

Who have cast funny clothes and shoes aside and are sailing for Scotland where they intend to cash in

On versions of Lionel Ritchie songs they’ve been rehearsing in secret. I make a living swallowing the swords

Of an ancient Japanese craftsman known only as “The Crane,” making hats out of paper flowers

And twisting moles and molemen out of the holes they’ve dug in the earth by grabbing them by their spines with a chilly hand

Or by charming dead Neanderthals out of their blocks of ice so we may see the folly of their overdone mode of dress.

Anyone who’s ever thought of calling someone over the phone to ask them to draw their portrait in miniature,

Who can possibly understand you? Even two lovers so close they can fit into one armchair comfortably,

Twisting their legs so it appears as though their bodies are a part of the furniture

Say to you that you are like a large storm at sea, but that you keep more expensive things in your icebox!

Come over here troublemaker, with that smile you stole from the Hamburgler,

Laughing like a science fiction author, and I’ll give you a good look at your ears after I smash them with my oak cudgel!

Apparently once again your Aunt Viv’s car has smashed

Into a post office box outside my accountant’s office last Saturday, while he was out playing the ponies. Two to one are the best odds I can please you with

On the off chance that you’d like to wager that a portrait of David and Goliath, painted in the same style as flames on the tail fins of low riders

Would goad you into chasing down a dump truck’s laughing driver

Until you came up alongside the cab of his truck to demand to know how it was that the weather he’d picked up in Toronto

Would try today to cool down the furnace of wrath lit up in your bosom.

Swordsmanship whose foots will not falter in spite of my strawberry pudding or my faulty engine!

Antique spoon-wielder forever sucking on a bottle of raspberry beer!

Coming over the garden wall with your sword pulled out of him, but then returned to its place, is your seamstress on time for an appointment

I saw you make, though you knew you’d not be able to keep it. You’d be too busy hurling epitaphs at border-crossers.

Girl afraid, I looked up the shoes you laid before our Thanksgiving turkey in the handbook of administrative assistantships,

And found no worthy introduction to them after four hours of research

In a sacred motel within shouting range of the train station.

What we should lay at the feet of the birds we cook the rest of the year hasn’t been made any clearer either by this most colorful investigation

Whose legwork was full of reading horrible letters written by inconsolate illiterates, penny-pinching oracles wandering through wheat fields

Trying to expel the vertigo laid on them by dancers who edge the rooftops of local apartment buildings without caution or life insurance

But won’t stop for a minute to contemplate why any phrase beginning with “Like the sands through an hourglass…” doesn’t drive Americans in the Maritimes to revolt!

The eternal smile of the twenty-two teeth.

For instance, who never cut open their arm on a spine of glass sticking out from a window they were washing

And who has never sucked up the blood from this cut and fainted and tumbled down a flight of stairs in the arms of a beautiful

Lump on the head, or a broken leg, or even lost an eye or an ear and been mad about it later and gone ’round with a bee in their bonnet refusing to vacate a public toilet on the streets of Paris?

Who hasn’t made the unappetizing climb up the hill to kill the head priest of Sacre Coeur

But upon getting there had to let out a howl like a dog because he had no nose, and one of his eyes fell out at the table over dinner

Because when the dancers gaily climbed the steps to the roof of an office building he told them

“Airplane drivers, you should pay the air for the grey acts of deputized ditch-diggers red-cheeked on amyl nitrate

You mail every day to the dead! O musical floor washers!

Germanized, androgynous flirts! Dandies with faces that have been pushed through plate glass!

Deer carcasses glazed in ice, tied to the hoods of cars with the lace of cherubim’s lingerie!

The branch manager of the biggest library ever deals out cards without fear on the hood of the cab driving me home,

Just as you’ve taught him to on days when too much rain or fog made traveling upriver in a canoe

To the frozen quays where the senator hoards the boats he’s stolen with the aid of a magic potion that makes him appear as though he were the Duke of Orange

Which gets him in easily to the best of the yacht clubs on nights when barbecue and gossip and talk of who’s fucking the tennis pro turn all eyes

Towards a troupe on stage who perform the jingles from everyone’s favorite commercials in the style of Bob Dylan (Clap onnn/Clap offf)

Without instruments while a force from beyond, which they cannot see, shakes down the night, gunning a black trombone.

In every air-conditioned laundromat, unless he’s busy getting the sun soused, Death is admiring you like a tea-kettle.

Your aunt opens a faucet and turns her body to face Zion at tea time, and then sets out some crackers and imagines the day of the Rapture,

And the tennis pro, with the wind in his hair, like you, moves into the smoking section of the mirrored bar

To watch a rainstorm rise off of a shirt he dry-cleaned himself!”