O torsion! O mutton-handed justice with a sour tasting throat lozenge!

O belt buckle! O perfume I discarded charged with being too nonchalant!

You’re all extras! Filling the pants of the poor with caesar’s salad dressing in an occluded doorway

While a day’s worth of groceries lies sleeping in a WWII-style French armchair.

Die the troubled death of being choked to death in the scissor-hold of some six-foot-six Aryan porn starlet like an internationally known moocher!

The languorous one with one-hundred-twenty-two keys and the blazing brunette

Carried the bare ass of an internationally known plantain tree climber on their shoulders, or the ass of the one who wasn’t there, whose name fled into the hills

To “DAN’S SHIRT WAREHOUSE: MORE SHIRTS THAN WERE EVER OWNED BY ALL THE FOUNDING FATHERS COMBINED AND MUCH, MUCH MORE” which could be smelled from miles away.

They paused to rub alcohol around the outsides of their mouths believing it could turn away bad breath

And shock the world. O wolves who bay for love on the moors! In time your pups will leap into baby carriages with their own sour breath.

Newspapers across the sea are found in the larder and woven into my clothes, and on the prairies this evening

The long fever of the drunken butcher broke when he discovered the temperate zone of the transient deer population.

The one with the powerful hair insisted that she was the trickster in the field, that she should be lifted onto men’s shoulders!

And there was something to this as well. Her mother was arguing this point before the UN Security Council in her blouse, internationally known for having woven into it

The masks nuns wear when they’re fencing, blue-boy magazines, Tattoo from Fantasy Island’s hair in flames, and eighty place mats from eighty meals served at the dinner theatre version of Aida.

Of almost no import whatsoever, and certainly not worth remembering, is the internationally known moan heard down on the docks: “I am a petty boar.

A monkey-grinder’s first mate. Deck hand on a fishing boat carrying perfume cut out of the throats of Hawaiian hoola girls by a cut-throat and stored in the cooler.

Where is the cabin boy to sell me his wide-winged bird, that for the love of DANNY’S SHIRT WAREHOUSE I might see the glint of golden angels through this dank

And open their flower-laden brassieres, to be poured into an embrace of certain Glory

And finally the creamy pussy where forgiveness lies for all earlier cold hearts?”

Die with your head plunged between your mama’s teats amorous drivers!

The D.A. will never cede this ocean to you or the one we spoke of earlier, really known only in the East, aflame

While monks’ ghosts stumble through the firmament, subtly queering the constellations

And Sara Vaughan sings to save you from your sins. O barbers in massage parlors!

Your babies are buried in basements embalmed with comb-cleaner!

Blue horses, makeshift house that we tend to and sweep,

Give me my vice laced up in a corset that promises a redder and still more immense creaminess, and sing out

With your sour breath unless the floor boards and bedcovers mix our promises underfoot

With what I have tried to fix in the depths of ambassadors confounded hearts:

The hubcaps of Coco Chanel’s limousine, the hospital wing bearing their names, and the bullfighter, dead in the ring.

Long and tall temporary secretaries?! Always! My hand dabs at my cranium, Lord,

Smearing rubies that followed me as I ran from rabid dogs and the sapphires that powered their legs.

I lay the several blames for sour breath in this poem on the tea the mostly-Hawaiian hoola girl Desiree (née Sir James) prepared!

Didn’t our fathers let us jet-ski in a bathtub swearing we’d take our own eyes out

Or after walking due west into the sunset should we let the wine do the remembering for us?