By the pale white wine and the lamp light that was lying there,

On the depth of her foul mouth, pregnant with the smells of a circus tent,

A cross-gendered hippopotamus woke up mid-way through an attempted pocket picking.

Who was lifting the keys to her ride home? None other than November’s Candy Striper of the Month.

She was digging above the sound of an oil painting of a blast furnace

In her navel for yesterday’s bottle of sun tan lotion

Which her midget aunt had loaned to her after stealing it from a wayward sailor whose neck she snapped when he turned to look at her ass.

He’ll never wonder again if the point where the sky meets the ocean as the morning passes over them is more blue or more green,

His eyes are closed like a box of Valentine’s chocolates that falls from your paramour’s arms in a car accident.

In the hedgehog’s lair the dull assistant to this morning’s shapely (but mad) scientist,

In whose breasts blood rushes as in the veins of the army preparing

To serve her, crosses a picket line of suffragettes though they’d helped tie her boat to the dock.

Listening to the sound of her feet, but calm as when flying on an aeroplane staffed by dishwashers,

The farmer’s wife’s beautiful seamstress opens up a lake in her lover’s eyes

In front of the tower guards of the animal fortress who look her over and pray

They’ll graduate from cooking school with their degrees and having seen her name written out in gigantic letters on the side of a ship so they might learn to open doors with their teeth.

Beautiful fort that makes us feel our age, that boils water for tea with no frills,

Super dictionary-class alphabet soup diners, she steams towards now you in a plane broken free from an amusement park ride

Leaving behind her the designs she’d made on yawning beneath an elm tree, and she is sallying towards you

To reclaim and unmake all the tender mercies due a pocket billiards champion in Kampuchea.

She is looking into the eye of the tempest at a pail whose cold time did not come to wash away off the beach.

The singer choked on the song he’d found in the trauma ward,

The Desert God studied the contents of his pockets but there was no end

To the line of bus boys who hoped to make the tip here that would clear their names in the kitchen.

Hippo-lite, dogstar to the stars, what do you think of these things when your chores are done?

Do you stand next to the trash compactor with the superintendent crushing the knees of your enemies until they offer to walk away

With the best of your roses sold off at bargain rates while you stroll out into the sunlight in a sack dress with no reason and no job to call your own

While the wind shuffles and pours porridge and flees from the crime scene?

My kisses land on the legs of round-faced women who glance at me only briefly with the eye of a passing elephant caravan

Where dyke masseurs shrink back from the oceans our fore-fathers crossed

And each of the Grand Tetons pauses to gun its motor at a stoplight and see if anyone slips in on their passenger side

Like a breakfast cereal delivery truck driver who finds he’s unwittingly swapped stockings with his father’s sister

As they passed one another outside the boiler room. What did you have to say then? As lords strapped L’s to their chests to signify their leaping free of the shackles of age,

As horses and jewelers took off their shoes before the hot beach sands…

Hippolyta, meditating on the coast, turn this mallet over in your hands. Examine it

In the shower. Toil, and lift your hatchet to throw it at me. Climb onto my back. Mount me like a dog giving me motion sickness.

Turn towards me with a yellow plate in front of you, howling for hypnotists to spring to life and give up their concentrated stares, eating instead all

The porridge undulating beneath your gaze and your charms and all the times you said “bombs away” instead of “good-bye.”

Lady Day will not sing of you or apologize for passing you on the stairs. I lift up the headset of the telephone and a voice volleys across

And I go to sleep next to you while the projectionist changes reels.

In May you are polite as a beatnik and lift out of your yellow fever:

“I am not standing behind a grate on this point and after that first mistake no one’s ever tried to fence me in again.

Mad at elephants, I shuffled and was juicily inky-eyed,

But anyone who came after me got knocked around by my eight terrible wheat-eating commandantes singing.

I can feel the hospital workers mining into my shoulder blades for movable tracts

And for black armies that arrive at night to drink sodas with the skeletons they’ve been paired with

Whose house keys press their lips against car doors begging to be driven down those roads where the wind is a breath

That slams down on us at the end of the day like a car door, crushing all our fingers, and parting our hair like a farm boy’s.

Have we earned our commission by committing strange acts with pack animals?

Tell me, poor mouth, of the troubadours that have climbed your stairs for your efforts.

I shiver all over in the rain when in your sickness you cry out to me, ‘My Angel!’

And my pen leaks a bloody stain through my jeans pocket and my mouth tries to find you among greenery in an alleyway.

But don’t look at me when I’ve had too much coffee. My cock thinks only of you

In a public toilet crushing gems with your bootheels as your sister enters Parliament

And you both are wearing the same dress in my mouth

And the cat calls go down into rivers wrapped in chains to map the depths of our diction!”

The barn-door closer shook out a coconut from her second-hand crinolines,

And like a wall that had been painted over three times and on the third pass is covered in a foot thick coat of iron

A poison air came back with a still drier foot, singing and banging its pot, if only to say

“What’s up doc? Are we going to lift love off its feet to see how many ostrich eggs it’s got hidden in its nest or sit dully in the parlor and talk about hell all evening?

Your fine sour taste was brought to me by the newsboy from Quebec, and since I can’t ever return you for my 5¢

I’ll open up the furnace door to melt you down and send you back to Parliament, and dance around, a simpleton

Solving problems by driving up their middles when no other solution announces itself or shows its promotional film clip.

Among other things the barn door swinger has mixed up above her head are truth, yellow jackets and Springtime!

Certainly residents of Southern Fla. would like to dance with me. The same step maybe not, but certainly under the same spell! Right out onto the driveways in front of their homes and onto the roadways of Rte. 1,

Cuban immigrants and their chauffeurs, into the night at their leisure,

And none of the chauffeurs are crushing gemstones with their uniforms or burying them under the bodies of trees

Or forcing them into the sun, the only hiding place left for love’s solitary accountants.

Go then, if that’s your game! Look for a co-op board

Who’ll send you to school in a small sea front town where you’ll have to live in a basement

And eat only the dull remains of the headmistress’s dinner of liver and beans.

You can get back to me later on how many scars you’ve received from the bit and being lashed by her reins…

If only you’d been able to content yourself taking cold baths and living the life of a waitress!”

Several deer on May’s lawn, cooking up griddle cakes with their sleeves rolled up while a large cloud shaped like the epileptic president rolls overhead

& bursts suddenly cry “We haven’t got the money or enough understanding of the monetary system to have this conversation before sunrise,

But a giant with a large butt, the same giant that ate my dog,

Is getting paid to cook recipes discovered in the ‘Suggestions’ box!

No one raised this monster up to jam his mitts

Into the Sun God’s fresh cream, which is to say nothing of changing the lightbulb at the back of the Frigidaire!

This is the same giant who set fire to his own hand and stood there letting it broil until his blood sang out

And he came riding out onto our farm insisting that he’d lost his way in the world

And that only by studying our dog could he be sure to find his way home again.

I’d like to see him thrown into the pit where man-eating insects are recruited for wages

And pour fresh cream over the boulder that seals his tomb!”

—Go down go down lawn chairs and tables! Shoplift the minutes we’ve set aside for canasta

Go down with the chemistry set of pesticides’ timetable!

Plunge into an open Bible in a Jehovah’s Witness’ lap, where all B movies

Run their titles across the marquis and paper the walls of their homes with patterns of musical instruments letting the wind blow through the empty string on their flagpoles.

Make bouillabaisse, mixing in an orange-scented cologne with your soccer cleats.

Brown fools, bitten on the ass by the dog of your desires,

Never will you pour your rage out of a soup tureen

And the song that rings on in your head will broadcast over every channel on Japanese Television.

Never will a cold silk stocking be pulled cleanly out of your orifices

And every golf ball you club off of your tee will fall into a bog with a sigh. A sickly miasma will overtake you at the wall every day as five o’clock rings out, and you will be too old and it will be too late to pick up your prescription.

Fill a trout’s apartment with the other inflatable life rafts which lantern carrying pool sharks overlooked

Although the smell of the shipwreck worked its way into their bodies long afterwards.

May a housecleaning ape with no dick devote his daily efforts to raise the dead to you

And raise the hem of your dinner jacket and twist your hair into a spacious home for vermin

And answer the door when furious winds blow bondsmen in to collect your husband from your wedding bed for jumping bail after revealing government science secrets in the Cub Room, too drunk to realize

He’d broken your chair and left you lying on your back like a painter fallen outside of her drop cloth.

Your loins will produce only purple children, errand boys with palsied knees and condemned buildings

That atrophy and fall in hunks into your beehive as you stroll the emptied lanes done up to look like a wolf in curlers.

Cast your vote for fate to leave you standing if you like, discord has already given the word for dirty hands to be sent up to your hotel room

And finish pulling you out of your suitcase where you’ve been hiding!