In de pinched sinuses of de old capital city

Where everyone gots an ugly momma, dere’s a contest for magicians

I guess. A really fat man sat on me, almost killing me, fatally.

De other magicians were mostly thinner and more decrepit, but most certainly more charming.

Dese monsters dislodged flowery shoes from women in de audience

Whether dey’d had dere small pox vaccinations or were still virgins. Dey’d give monster kisses to dere bosoms

Or shake dem upside down til love notes fell from dere pants pockets. For de encore dey turned everybody into an ass.

On de underside of dere soupspoons de truth is engraved, and embroidered on de underside of dere winter handkerchiefs

Are directions to an on-ramp for de B.Q.E., where you don’t gotta scream out insults at other motorists through a bullhorn

To merge onto dat rolling fracas in an omnibus.

And on de driver’s side, near de ancient Virgin Mary statue mounted on dere dashboard:

A small embroidered sock filled with flowers and air fresheners.

Everyone trots out to the trattoria under umbrella to have their marriage license shrunk down

Or to see trained seals come forward after brushing their teeth to help out the tigers with buckshot in their mouths

Or to dance serpentine, without wanting or voting on who should be the ship’s captain opening the door and inviting us in. The pavement is really blurry, the small sons

Who depend on stealing pennies from Saint Peter’s underwear drawer all tooting or broken or in cassocks that hang to the knee

Or are the sons of trees. They’ve got a yellow coffee percolator that ants consider too trilobite-friendly.

Louisa’s aunt writes to say that the trousers or the trout walking in through the dog door are dancing in the nut house tonight!

Aint it them who leapt into the layer cake in search of a little girl’s

Car keys while a rat ate crackers from the Russian psychic’s turban?

—Have you seen the heads maintenance men are circulating around the little cities?

They’re pressed up against aborigines while a film of an elephant sitting on the childhood me

Crumples my desire for solitude. In the pastry beer hall behind the pastry shop

An easy-going show biz goat captured my attention, and sat on me.

A phantom threw up on Jean Trudeau behind the scoreboard where he ate his lunch.

Crossing a pair of streets four militant blackboard designers

Surrounded me on Tuesday cursing the extra wheel on the fragonard’s car

Already en route and softly in the sea, with chains wrapped around a new bearcat coat.

The least of the magicians, whose meditations surely made a tree sit down on me

And the chapel. All I ever expected to hear him say or do was mumble discord and dust

And how many times did he have to draw the hoover over his reveries

Laughing into a bottle because he’d sold cadavers for grocery money?

—Say you’ll deputize me to resolve the fates of a million car alarms

And I’ll spend my days crusading to quiet the city with retired refrigerators hurled from the back of a flat-bed semi.

Tell me you are the mysterious janitor from the provinces whose ineffable magics

Are captured live on film lowering misfortune’s milky ass from above!

The postman was in love with a defunct pastry chef

And he pressed his thighs together in the capital. “Hats! Don’t make my soufflé cave in!”

He cried, unaware of who was clutching him. So his excitement blew out like birthday candles

As a bus fare collector wrapped eight arms around his flowery bosom.

—All true! But the cheese man was shorter than I’d originally reported,

And it was he who, while making his moves on the sleeping bee-keeper,

Told devotedly of his love for the ailing Louis Pasteur,

A monstrous secret I couldn’t keep from yelling to the skies.

The moon loves a pastry chef too, but a much fatter one

Than the one I was talking about earlier, whose gloves collect a fee for every sad dream I bore you with

But it was the latter of the two who bought his son a night-light in the shape of the Virgin Mary

Which shines in his room like the moon-lit sea while the poor boy cries himself to sleep!

Ah! That airline stewardess is bringing me all these small cities

And one of them, tucked between the others, has the sun going down on it as we speak.

The blood in its sky blushes out across its greens

And I realize that the stewardess is banking on me writing all this down. From her cart

She pours out the drink of whatever she hears you asking for, or she lifts her skirts, or pulls money from her cunt,

But every once and a while she has to slap the hand of some soldier who’s sticking his nose again in her gardens.

Tell me though, who can sleep through a golden lion leaning in the doorway

Who hasn’t written home at least once from an airplane about the love of their home town?

She stood there looking at me dryly, as proud and wise as the post office.

The heat advanced on us and we sang out for our lives and carried her onto our shoulders,

And her eyes opened up on us as the eyes of an old eagle

And we draped across her marble forehead the laurels she had so long been deserving!

Let me tell you chimneys so I said it to it and the same day a florist

En route to a licorice store a day’s journey by vilification said to me

“Mother of brown, doncha know, this courtyard’s been a sand box or aint it? Out with it!

Don’t ever before now some goose lists the names signed up to split us up the middle and aint that city life for ya?”

You who seize a football or dispute and fuck you too legless monkey-foot lover

Not only do you remember! Once ivory gone to night court entered the building

You insult in the hallway on your way out. Once more, sweet and pungent.

On your clawfoot roulette wheel blackjack table rigged but with fresh cut flowers old man lock yer door at will.

Chains and groans and moans recollected from boarding school, brown rat eyes in the afternoon peeping out

From your handbag your purse. Let go of your double bass you cut all your hamstrings

Meticulous and neurotic. No Sale rang out around you at the depot and you fell to your knees in the dust!

Didja cut your penis with bottle glass? A full moon tonight certainly a bad omen overflowing flower pots with foxglove and flox.

But me, me who didn’t ever have a lion to understand me tenderly with big eyes on the land you were surveying.

The eye in the darkness in the quiet French restaurant overseeing the mechanical arm. At Easter we dyed any eggs we could find regardless

All those thrown at us we caught. Your father threw rocks from the center of his meditation he’s a small city

Pouring milk out or following a holiday landing comfortably in a dumpster three stories down.

I can see your voluble epaulets your flowers passing us in the onion fields where we take our pleasure

Some breeze or nine I eat middle-eastern yogurt dishes I visit—no wait—I visit your flowers on days only union members card wielders forget us

The middle one carries himself over into the game of it the flowers are caught pressing themselves across your highway!

A small month refills or pauses and says all your cut flowers are upright and in transition

In the street! My family! Oceans of sea-cows with generalissimos mounted!

I would make of each sour evening a colonel’s fried fish patty by God!

Only were you or did you burn your lowered hands eighty-something in the evening

On whose fish weights did the griffin of your frayed housecoat dye the wool of your oceans?