Merely dangerous Latin Kings, bags of fat tomatoes,

The both of them or their bathhouses, long sofa-bed pull-out kisses or joyous

Cups of warm chocolate at sunrise, rising with the cockatoo in the window of an ice cream parlor. I throw a bit of my pastélé to a large bird but a small bird takes it away so I have to throw a bit more to the large bird who’s still hanging around.

I was carving a drinking fountain out of an elephant’s skull, but then one night I deserted the whole project and woke the next morning in a public park with my pants around my ankles and my ass exposed on the lawn.

Merely dangerous Latin Kings with bags of fat tomatoes, like a woman in a white T-shirt guarding her breasts in a surprising rainstorm

The both of them or their bathhouses echo with songs off dead sea-men’s tongues, and although this park closes at midnight, the fountain isn’t timed to stop until three.

The desert nomad’s suitcase was thrown from the plane when it was discovered that he was really a desert nomad. Fortunately it landed on a beach, and eventually the sands pushed it back to him. The pastry chef forgot how to spell his name

And so started smashing a warm cranberry muffin onto sensitive documents for the stains it left like blood lifted from my aunt’s wrists as she thrashed about indecisively in the tub. A glossy magazine ran an article about the wheat-only diet adopted by the soccer star

And ran photographs of orange growers rioting outside his hidden fortress after he’d reneged on a promotional contact. He ran onto the field at the start of his last game with a hand-painted banner that read “They’re poisoning the fruit!”

The both of them or their bathhouses echo in the night the lapping tongues of mermen after leaping into the lap of the book store cashier!

The both of them, pinching the Pyrennees after borrowing a nickel, climbing over the lip of a crescent moon, dressing up like the Michelin Tire man only to break down crying

From the pinches of milkmaids leaping out from behind the soup tureen! Like a small dog you never stop barking at nothing. The sound of your own voice

Finds its only equal in the sound of a rolled-up newspaper swinging at your nose and missing. The stars in the bathhouse ceiling shine down on you

And Venus drops a chocolate sweeter than Sappho singing “Jailhouse Rock”

On the both of them, and damned if the Pyrennees don’t pinch you through your riding pants where the sun don’t shine.

The both of them tear down the curtain during the half-time show and call out the names of women they wish they’d never slept with

Whose body funks still rattle in their closets. Crates of stolen tea arrive on the shores of the island

The girls had their yearbook photo taken on, their bodies twined with octopuses.

Careless laissez-faire economics applied to the murders of the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour,

The both of them, smoking their torn-apart prom dresses and lifting up the hems to reveal eleven kangaroos they’d been hiding beneath. Latin

Kings, where are you now? I invoke your presence in this poem in blue and orange basketball shorts knowing that if you’d seen her as I’d seen her you’d want to try to do what I wanted to try to do in the boys’ bathroom of a nearby high school, but the door was open onto the hall and I was afraid someone would see. Perhaps you’d do it anyway. Perhaps you’d do it out in the hall.

At last the view from inside the whale shows up on a tour of the Plankton Museum, and the front man for the tour forces a fifteenth cough drop into his cake hole and mutters something about Mina Loy and how she appeared to him in a dream, on a staircase in a nightie

With two tires and a really oversized King James Bible signed by King James himself. An overweight leg-breaker—freelancing these days, but working mostly with a team of guitar-wielding bruisers

Named, respectively: René, The King of the Gumdrops, Billy the Law Maker, and Saint Theresa—

Was eating refined sugar from a bag all weekend wearing nothing but a dinner jacket,

And that was the last I saw of him, at the Plankton Museum, leaning against the fence that blocked off the staircase to Mina Loy’s bedroom.

Two giant tires had taken on the roles in a local play of the White Rabbit and the March Hare

But one had gotten a flat in a local bakery and was prescribed a long rest at some sea-side spa where packs of wild and ambitious dogs roam at night

Dressed in loin cloths stolen from radials & sun gods at the height of the day turning smiles and laughter to sour grimaces.

Talk amongst yourselves about nothing in particular for a moment while I decide if I’m going to finish this poem, or leave on a small boat bound for the Sahara to see a

Pair of tires about a fat senator’s pardon for the crime of being late to his race horse’s cocktail party!

After all, who throws dice at an ostrich? The both of them, having been their own judge for years

And throwing out the entire front wall of their house so we could witness the work involved in Balinese pail dancing on the Road Less Traveled

In which Sisi balances a door knob weighing more than Noah’s flood

On her forearms while her mother runs her fingers through her russet tresses?

Which of you, having never thrown dice at an ostrich is really suited to be their judge?

Especially when it is our responsibility to bring Lois Lane to justice for all the insinuations she managed to make in the deli in just

One day, Friday, while Jules Verne drank his liquor with his sled dogs and lime, and the hanging judge painted landscapes of three chapels,

And your religion got voted in as the one with as many pauses as Quaker Oats in a hurricane,

And Tanya Harding laughed and laughed because the law enforcement agencies were all responding to the 911 call of a sea lion

Rocking on its belly in a canoe on the violent river that flows past the hydroelectric plant that provides the juice for all the lime juicing machines.

In a car the both of them reached between their toes searching for a matchbook with the name of my favorite steak and roller derby house.

They poured a decanter of wine on the sidewalk through the open window and before forcing the singer out of the car in the rain, they floored it and lit the secret supply of nitro so that flames shot from the tailpipe, and they rocked on towards the highway on the verge of breaking the sound barrier

And just as I was fussing with my photograph of Desi Arnez in his infancy, haunted by the approach of a dark phantom in the form of administrative offices

That rifles through his handkerchief drawer battling with giants armed with socks filled with yardsticks

The car—between the two of them they couldn’t find their own mother in a coffee house filled with Swazilanders.

The deputy cried to the Lord “All I want is to write one sonnet worth my weight in millet and to locate

The comma you’ve hidden in ‘Sentimental Journey,’ and sure enough, from its steel perch, a condor made rich

By a nationally televised quiz show threw down nuts and bricks made of tartar sauce left out to dry since Watergate,

And I still maintain that their shapes bore the face of the Cowardly Lion blasted into them by a laser beam powered by the sun,

Although the deputy prays over his meals “Lord, all I want is to write one sonnet that will fling open the doors to the local peep show

So I can see if my mother is involved in a dull conversation with a gentleman and his muffin,

And permit me to sing my prayers low enough to shy that condor back to his cave.”

One night I was dining with a sting ray in an Italian restaurant whose poems about the both of them he was trying to trade me for my car keys

When like a magic trick, who should appear in the kitchen door but Sappho, keeping our waiter with the tea service

From telling us if the sea was involved in a dull conversation with a gentleman and his muffin!

But you can only delay the mail, Sappho! The multitudes of letters that pass through the sickening hands of the post office

Are greater than the pails full of semen contained in the belly of Venus on the morning after the night before the fleet ships out!

Mina Loy was dancing on the deck of a ship with reindeer beside her in the night as pool sharks and transient extra-terrestrials waved machetes

Around in circles above their heads tracing in the firmament the words spoken by a pair of dueling

Mailmen. Sappho is climbing the steps to the post office.

More bells than Venus had said could rescue us from our surly mandates

Were singing and swimming through the libraries caroling, disguised as naiads just birthed from the mouth of Summer

In polyester hospital gowns. We descended disguised as the Loch Ness Monster in his youth in search of our bed linens.

The grumpy ocean dropped below our feet enchanted

By the many bells hanging around the necks of All-Star baseball pitchers and race car drivers!

Sappho, more than twice a day, had been coming down to bang on the locked door of my blast furnace,

When she caught in her rabbit trap an ailing colt. She whisked him away to her parlor for tea.

She fitted him for the saddle of a mounted archer in the pasture of a soup cook in the afternoon, and in the evening she took him to strip clubs where

John Donne sat beating off while a golden man whipped him with his limp dick to pay for his supper

Of enough celery stalks to block the doorway of my blast furnace.

They say the deputy is trying to sell the both of them his menthol cigarettes

And the mail is piling up lazily in the home of the justice of the peace where he cuts gaping holes in his poems to the moon

And sends them hot across the wires each night to the duke of the underworld and the tennis court judges

Who steal off towards the railroad stations and leap forth from giant pastries at the riverbank!

And the deputy is trying to sell the both of them his menthol cigarettes!