Floating past your bad sunglasses, the sons of old benchwarmers

Carry paint for the butcher’s ceiling. Your eyes call down to your toes:

“Minotaur, make me one of your meagre orange sandwiches.

Chop down a tree covered with crickets, sailors and news reporters, if need be,

But I’m the author of these green verses, and so I’m tapping into the face of my right to vote for sandwiches.”

The voting booths are colorless machines into which daytime makes no dent

And my fingers twitch with an infernal fever,

Fooling with the wide fish you’ve seen pulsing in my pants.

Under the hot dog stand on the boardwalk, a pale bell rang out

And subhuman midget queens hurled their fishing lures

Onto the fronts of the ten brassieres of poets who’d had their portraits taken

In Vienna gasping over the bodies of their bloody sisters.

A Chinese violin knocked into Lenore’s dinner table turning

My Chevy off the road. Sue paid for Claire’s taxi.

In your memo it says that you’re also a professional dancer from Langtree, Texas. Had I turned

My Chevy accordingly, my psychiatrist would have just sat looking at me quietly

—Looking at me as if to say: “John, lap-dancing in the furnace right now

Is the Goddess of Virginia. Laugh at her uni-bra and you’ll be drinking tea beyond the gate

And every traffic guard will be up in your face

Like the moon descending behind the veil of Earth.” Authors of sabotage,

In my heart I am afraid to go to Virginia and show my hands to men.

Currant bushes, with fervor, towards the abyss are bent

And who, my soul-brethren, would prefer to be paid

All the wages of their death among the fir trees of Rappahannock?