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By series: Bridge St  In Yr Ear  Ruthless Grip

from The Garden of Eden a College



But who-


the more

plausible speculation did win, drawing a Mongolian screen
around the dispute -- though perhaps that was in the 1970s, before they stored giraffes
in a diorama of the savannah
tufts of larval grass
sprung up around hindquarters
the surrounding statuary
culled from our civilization
despair of which, while archaeological
passes to a last protrusion:
her left thumb curled below
her right ear


              What brings you here

My legs, what else


              What about this job makes you want to pounce all over it

After serving three years
I cannot have a complete thought
without moral enthusiasm
revolving in the rear of my mind


              Why are you a good candidate

Short fences, low mounds


              Would you like a prolonged
              stupid accident, a partial death
              both in us
              and obliged to us

Excuse me I noticed all this merchandise stuffed in my bags


              Do you suppose

No. I move from place to place
without supposing


              That supposes a road

Right but I'm looking to get away from that

              Jacqueline you must keep taking a
              part away you can't have sympathy
              for any individual part
              Passing, yet ceasing, you
              have patrolled yourself
              almost peacefully
              what you say
              stays only so
              and you did such
              as ever does of you
              You did it much and even as it
              were you, you were the feelings
              of one person as modified by
              the presence of others, so why such a difference
              emerging from darkened rooms into
              still darker cabinets
              to snatch the innocent medium
              from the pit dug for her feet?


              You must learn never to wake up empty-handed

But how will I know




                                                                      Children will work
                                                                      if they think they're in heaven, goes the song


I've been double crossed
or I've been framed
or my soul broke
when I was playing handball
on the back of a rock
where not for lack of love
but its shortcomings
I played alone


                                                                      Advice it is
                                                                      to extort from you
                                                                      gently across an upturned whack
                                                                      the no-thing that makes us affectable
                                                                      a shrift of horrible mist
                                                                      bounding in from the forest
                                                                      your hourglass eyes
                                                                      resting on a paint job's
                                                                      exaggerated clumps. Oligarchy
                                                                      redeems consciousness, what else?
                                                                      An accident in the cabbage aisle
                                                                      around the side of which
                                                                      we'd be indebted to find it
                                                                      like a gleam in agate



(These are all very good questions but stop
asking them. You are like us
remember? You like us)



Dangerously the rain dried
pressing her biography
open to a parting
curious for its last
pressure-less clasp
the subject exposed
down to his dendrites


                                                                      Every superfluity counts , I mean it
                                                                      takes away from attention to something --
                                                                      which is fine for a while




I marched on Rome it
pulled a gun on me the
passage of fluid through an
organ grinder monkey
sometime after Adam
and before the last