In the bleach-scrubbed city, the city of plainly dressed ghosts

Where the spectre of the raccoons that made up the soccer player’s coat stops passers-by for change

Few mysteries are as cool as you washing your dishes in the sink.

A birdbath is found in the back right pocket of an enormous thief.

In the morning I suspect I’ll find you having an affair in the street.

A limousine runs over the broomstick left out on the fire escape.

The two doves that oversee foreclosures for foreign banks

Eat the wall paper off the walls of an actor’s water closet

And a hot dog vendor gave away his wurst for free. How did your young face fill his empty kitchen?

Gloria Gaynor is going around again as I bounce into the bread basket,

Cut into once more by your butter knife in my own bathroom, gypsy lass.

The stove pipe hat that you stole for me from the fruitless halls of dead law

Has all of a sudden become home to an old goose, and the gonorrhea pimps strut around me,

Imitating the color of the sky they see on television.

Do you think that seeing my aura is anything like seeing a sea anemone crying?

Without the mechanics of the moon untying my shoelaces while I fall asleep with a cigarette in my mouth, in your eyes

I’m just another chocolate candy in the mouth of a French detective. One that gets eaten in a car wash is what she’s saying with her wine-stained feet.

In the service you signed your letters as though you had a cold. The soft ice-cream machine

And the Hasidic barber rode alongside you on the back of an ass as you descended the cliff face

To visit the only drive-in theatre in the valley, across from the yard of the prison for war traitors.

He never could walk you to the voting booths that had been broken down in the cornfield. Your crane

Was making a perfect right angle resting on his shoulder,

So the submarine captain unrolled his map of deep-sea mines

As a gift to you before he turned on his heel and went to see the podiatrist.

On all fours an aging Odin cross-examined you about his missing three patés.

In the snow and in the haunted house he tromped about

Slaughtering more and more of the pigs of the psychic bankers,

Mad at the universe he’d stubbed his toe against.

His sons paraded into the living room holding their heads crying “Oh vey!”: the barber, Abiyoyo, two sea dogs, Loki.

There was no way to tell them apart though. I inferred they’d all been sold out of the same womb.

A hundred year old giant, whose glasses broke

Last March under the same feet as wrote down this poem but never knew it

Complains that each time his name is mentioned in infamy, it’s been like a kick in the ass

Where a giant mechanic drove by with his blinkers on and what could be more humiliating than that?

If the car I rent comes with seven geese in the back, minute by minute

That sinister old duck is going to ply his way into the crotches of each!

What old film-house-by-the-way laughs at my inquietude?

And who isn’t wearing Sassoon jeans in their brother’s walk-in freezer?

Song I heard through the wall while watching my aunt’s body deteriorate,

In September you are hiding in the air in the shaftway between my hat and the top of my head.

Have I yet, without frowning, looked at the humidifier

As Susie danced across the wood floor, ironing her veil?

Did you ever throw up in Phoenix, having eaten a dinner of pasteles and pears and lemonade?

—In May I turn the swans around so they face the funeral pyre.

As exasperating as an ironing board used by two volleyball players at once

Is trying to walk back into your house after you’ve locked the keys inside, and one of your gloves falls into an air vent

And a young boy spills hot chocolate on your leg. Unless Spring has already arrived by February to trouble you

For a half-dozen eggs on the steps of Parliament, resting on your shoulders a Labrador retriever who howls at the radio

Vehemently, then as your mother raised you to do, you must take him away to a labor camp for dogs

Where rainstorms regularly blast the hammers out of the housing of a piano.

My heart is dancing, dancing like an old gibbon in a saloon

Without carpeting, with the King of the Mermen, and without floorboards!