Laundromat, I think of you. This little sleeve,

Poor and twisted, in the mirror I see spots of green

The immense majesty of your dryers cannot fluff away.

A Chinese woman is thinking for me of who has a big enough faucet

To get the stains of shit out of my fertile armchair

As I carry my laundry home alone.

The old Paris is no more (the form of a city

Changes too quickly, I have broken another heel getting drunk in a motel);

I don’t see those old queens touting their broken camp anymore,

Their dry painted pouts and their fits.

The Arab grocery store owners stop up the pipes with greasy rags

And, ever brilliant for the camera, mangled Confucian odes.

The satellite was singing in the garden

About life as a Jew one morning, and the sour sky

Was cold and clear like on Thanksgiving, and slipping towards us through the window

Was your sweet mouth and a somber orangutang. In the silence of the morning

A swan who had escaped from the offices of the heads of state

Holding in his feet a piece of concrete sidewalk

While the sun trailed off his white feathers like radio waves

Pressing a dry Russian river onto his tongue as he opened his beak

Came banging nervously

And said in a voice as clear as dog urine in bathwater

“When was the last time you had a bath? Why did you turn against your father?”

I could see the mailbox was missing, it had fallen

Towards the sky several times before, like that guy Ovid talks about,

And there, ironically, was the sky, mocking me with its blue,

His feet up, his jaw flapping

—Coming on the dress I’d worn to visit God!

Paris has change! But none dances in my melon,

No silver in my teeth! Palace nymphs, children in bandages, blocks,

Old cheesemakers, I’ve grown allergic to them all,

And my chairs remember a time when I had the company of more nurses than vultures.

The museums are for kangaroos now, and they’ve leapt onto my back at their first opportunity.

I think now of the enormous swan, with its rubber foot,

Laughing like an exile beneath a lemon tree.

I walked with a hard-on in a ditch, and there I found you

My laundromat, with more brass than a wig-maker’s tomb.

Vile beetle, under the hand of the magical troupe of faggots

Baby-sitting the tumbleweeds in your ghostly toupee

Is the vulva’s director breathing hellfire onto our ears at last!

I think of the woman who lost her two front teeth in a bakeshop, and so she spoke with a lisp

Spitting on my feet on the boulevard, looking entirely like an oil painting of Hagar the Horrible.

Those who make hats with the feathers missing dance “Le Freak” better than any others,

Banging their asses loudly against the walls of the boiler room.

At five o’clock I forgot something I could not remember

About what Jesus had made in Jamaica! And those who hold back their tears

And let a band play loudly in their heads like a good loaf of bread

—They’re immigrants with secret violins of their own hidden away like hairy flowers.

In the forest I went on a sexy dancing spree.

An old sow came to me across the plain, snuffling my clothes.

I think now about all the mushrooms we’ve forgotten on a desert isle,

Of their caps, of when the rain comes... and of Gene Autry’s horse.