Sometimes when I think of you drinking red wine from a clear glass the room is shaken

Or I’ve forgotten to open the flue above the fireplace and a bat flies down into the flames who would have otherwise beaten me at a contest of making dark towers out of playing cards like a greenhorn,

Which I am at heart, have been ever since, like a chimney sweep, you sic’d your hell-hounds on me, their fangs

Making me cry out absurdly, though only the apes were left in the forest to hear my yellow voice.

I have seen you stuffing cotton balls into chocolates at the factory quite frequently, tilting your head to one side like a wild boar

In a butoh performance, and I’m fully aware that you’d stand me up against a wall before a firing squad for my poetry

And though I don’t want you to lose any part of your decaying vegetable frown, these facts

Are like the white flour that falls from your wig onto your epaulets at the end of a glorious film.

Prawns cannot surmount you. Dictaphones waste days in submarines trying to find a way to be your call girl.

The ass of my pantalones was torn open by army ants trying to fund your refugee relief projects

And beneath the stars a sow talks from the school superintendent’s office phone

Sending out your curriculum vitae to day-traders to convince them of your virtue.

Yes, harlots in motorcycle jack boots spit forth gems when they approach your name smiling. On the average,

Mollusks travel farther and suffer greater hardships trying to guess your age

As the winds lift you up by your feet on your way to the grocery. You know that eating raw lumber when there’re no aperitifs to be found among the rubble of the collapsed house

Is a sure-fire way to get upchucking in a hurry. “Confucius says,” you say, “Most Parisians

Will come back to smoke here again, once the smell of the smokestack is gone.”

Swiss processor-chip makers toast you with champagne from the battlements, bleaching

Their mustaches as you drape yourself over the old landscape.

It is all Lebanese florists can do not to have their elephants fall down in front of your navel

And dress up like a seedless grape, bobbing in the Indian Ocean. Only in you does the magpie

Drive an ambulance and write letters from the Eiffel Tower to a foreign aunt of an illuminated orgy

Where speech makers and soft-spoken matadors help Bierce Ambrose

Carry in a leggy stewardess from LaGuardia. Even people who think that the harbor

Is what makes travelers antsy to loom over an animating studio freely espouse

Red wine rolling over your dolorous tongue and onto your blouse and cigarettes,

Because the goosier you become when recounting your exploits

And the more regal, the better all these fake dons can see that yours is the dance of the King of Leverage.

Pull the chewing gum from your hair and let the dogs run through your heart to line up for soup at the bursar’s office,

Of all the old-time bank robbers who paint with a stick of margarine in silence,

You alone touch the dead dare-devil in me, who having reached the end of his last bottle

Had his bar tab calculated, got up onto his feet, and ran screaming out onto the dance floor!