dcviii

The wealth of nations floated onto our lips....

I used to write a lot
right here.

I’m so dense. People Will Talk
with Frank O’Hara, Newsweek, and
the porn browsers (The Stars Come Out at Night)?
Get real.

Saturday night:
Imperial rolls with a reformed Mormon from Taiwan.
All the names I don’t remember. [“Don’t mind me, I’m just visiting.”]

Nothing like misreading Ashes
on a Friday morning (midnight-thirty).

Everything he writes comes with its own cocktail
and a jet flotilla. Clink!

dcvii

Your nose is so humid tonight.

And the beautiful meat you offered,
its tiny stomach, reminded me so much of
foreign travel.

The neighbors clink their glasses again. I cough
a toast to them. I need a Ricola, get out of bed—
third time in the last hour. I remember dinner

at a place I call Macaroni. That’s its name, actually.
With its little bath of sunflowers.

I found a new job
in my dream last night. Or I was let go of another.
It was the academy. They convinced me
I’m a failure at everything.

The learning curve is atrocious.

There goes the dog in the basement—as we approach
nearly 4 years together. Perhaps a savings account is in order.

I really had the best birthday ever
on Friday. It’s amazing just to be alive.

dcvi

A purple shirt in the distance.  A blue dream.
The green beneath his wings.  An orange laugh.

Naked red.  He reads for pages and pages
without reading anything except the
darkish figure in his periphery.  Yeah

we all do that.  (At one point
he stretches a bit too far
into a pair of blue underwear.)


                                         —Sushi in French.

dcv

Why is she touching his nipple?
A less resentful gaze at the little black umbrella
over the baby’s carriage, that’ll do.     The one behind the fountain

driven dry.     A little adolescent
mustache never hurt, either. Everyone says this.   It’s true.

              That is incorrect.   This is clearly painful.     I’d rather we forget this part.

Back at the showers we avoid eye contact,
mere apprentices. The tutors come along,
take off their shirts, wag their hairs,

and all-too-soon drive their little green motorcycles home.
And then the children dance,
driven wild by their papas’ skirts.

What is intoxication, after all?


                       —The Gallery of Desire (having lost it all and then wondering what it was like)

dciv

Let’s bare it down to a minimum.
I like your chest your stomach your bones.
Anything you that is naked.

Sure, some days you grow dork
and remind us of someone else we want to fuck.
But this only goes on for a time.

Please keep your shirt off anyway.

dciii

It is good to read Ashbery in Paris.
How he becomes predictable.
I mean to the very word!

Á la the shirtless youth hooked up to an iPod
hooked up to his latest smoke. She’s a tart, too.
They’re all right, aren’t they?

Or the mommy whose cellphone gets caught in baby’s bun.
Baby doesn’t mind. He has creative explosion.
Yes, wittle boy wants his stwawbewwies without gwass, pweez.

What hour will he be getting out of the shower, anyway? We wait.
Whilst each day another tank-top floats casually into
The System;

its smooth skinless shades smurf the shadiest of skins.
A rare turn-on, Barbecue. And he says he had a
romantic evening.

Happy endings.
What a blur.
[Delete]

dcii

I missed your call
because I dropped my phone into the ocean.
Now if only you would sink.

He had that hungry look,
like a west coast snowflake.
Everyone went along for the ride.

Throw in a proper insult and we’d be climbing the trees
for a drink of water.
Also good to know the direction of the wind

between you and your fountain.
“He’s open to all kinds of interpretations” indeed!

Two pigeons dance
next to a splotch of irreverent color.
[Insert drama here.]

“This is utopia I could sleep here all year
my toes crammed into this new shoe
I can’t get out of,”

scream the swallows.


                It was an uneventful year.

dci

My coffee and I
would care to sit here next to you
while you cap those shades.

Mind?
Don’t mind?
OK then,

I’m just waiting for Metro-boy number 7
to turn me on.
He’s the critic. He knows how.

* * *

Soon I forgot that I was a foreigner
on the sandy shoals of British Airways
(’twas a criticism of the New York School).

* * *

Transportation communication
will get you nowhere.

dc

It’s not just that the sore throat of youth
has left us nor that the gargoyles have come a-creepin’
(that sort of thing)....

What we’ve got is the gays with their high-end service
(nothing good but amateurism). Oh, the nonsense they pour
from one serving unit into another.

Everybody drinks it up. Thinks it’s the good life.
And then what’ve we got?

There’s no solution to that problem.

* * *

Mostly I’m happy, though.

             One long walk through the cobbled streets
             and I’m too drunk to ever blink again.
             Allo.        Oui.

Heureux.


                                      —Place des Vosges (two boys toying with their sandwiches)

dxcix

I’m tired of the language I want to speak.

It’s an easy operation,

the removal of the soul. Gutters fill

with such techniques as would

wow heretics (and their stool-pigeons).

I told you life was funny.


                      —as we descended into the crypt

dxcviii

Another postapocalyptic moment:

“Hello, nothing.”   (And not wonderfully.)

The hot lines of a double simile:
what a used-up device.   (And what a green mess.)

                       Closes eyes and repeats baby 3 more times.

Takes the elevator to floor number 4
without speaking French.

Ah, Reverend Poems. And his Quick Hodgepodge.
Them all walking too fast down Straight Street,
frightened of an erection.

The mundane will never feel that good
again.   (He thought a moment
as the dog broke into a fit of laughter.)

                        The distant buzz of blackberry.
                        Put that into your yellow book.
                        Then the President went off on God.

It was such a shame that
he’d spent the whole morning with meaning.

dxcvii

He has excited the pigeons
past the Bourst and past Le Depot.

The green men sneak out onto the street
early of a morning. They

cleanse the soul of le cité.
I’m drinking water

without twirling plates (avec gaz).
Heart still flutters

and wants to Alp in a Swiss chalet
and boink like minks.

Oh goodness, modernity!

dxcvi

Reading the Pain Issue.
He spoke no English,
turned abuse into unfinished phrases—

smacked them all together and...voilá!
Accumulation is work.
Look at the toilet with sunglasses

by Polo. Yet,
he never makes a plan. Not one.
Now pregnant editing

triplets. See. That was the plan!
Now the children are grown up, dancing.
We planned that, too,

walking around
as foreigners; past
the manufacturer of paper

and penis tissue.
Crossing the arsenal
he says

“A tw___
is not as good as
a D___.”

(Key:
ink,
ILF.)

dxcv

Red blimp over bird.
Swallows? How should I know?
I don’t even live in this city.

Robin’s worked-out. Cruised by
Jacques the Ripper.
Her siren’s in Paris.

Things I thought of all morning and can’t remember now.

I’m just getting old and horny.
Whatever,
Oscar Wilde.

She sings in a cypress.
A red blimp over a blue swan.

Swallows—
where all of the mockingbirds were.