Dan Dan Dan

THE MAP (IMBECILES)

began as our little secret but something happened

because we wanted something to rescue us

from our contacts

that night happened into the plot

a guy named so and so

keeping abreast of the fountains

the man with icicles for teeth speaking rather pleasantly of the need for better public transit

and you rode the bus earlier

were you at a rally or just making things up?

Yes I was there

Rather, do you need consolation?

Where there is no map, there is no journey?

Where there is no journey, there is no earth?

Where there is no earth, there is no technology?

They were always asking for it

To not feel like anything? if it's at all possible? someone asked

Anything is possible right? Still?

That they were from somewhere else was only one suspicion  

Among the many we had had. Sometimes? Evening came a little early?

It was natural to see appearance. Did you need

It more after a light supper or like later

Like right before getting into bed? What woman did I hear

Committed to the birth of a child? Often times they did

The only natural thing.  Subtly kept speaking.

The little secret. Over and over. Into machines that night

happened into the plot via some very special rigging, wires and string.

Something had happened well above us

An event

Always having to say how you want it cooked

And none of that is really important. You run out of breath

Talking all night in your pajamas? Often times you did

When everywhere you would find its excuse.

Do not go

As though you had let it get away, and what now

You go anyway, and what now

Incites expenditures, but may not have precedence

And they’d be at the table, picking their nails

Acting all bored and shit while you sit there

Acting like they're idiots

But burning inside and someone and anyone else can see this

As though you had let it get away under your skin

Become your skin?

THE Subcommittee on Rules

One begins certain to finish but in support

Of other, farther waves

Waves close. An article

Of definite surrender percolates within secret proceeding waves

Or something else we ought to manage in our legislature sends

A bright stare into a black hole.

It’s possible they'll begin paying attention the very minute the blinds go up

On its shrewd bedroom scene. The self-misunderstanding you are

Expected to have at the beginning dissolves, as thin as the wafer

Passing by. Yet there are mothers fanning an old heat to their boys

Trembling in the ghostly livery of photographed afternoons.

Below is something in me like sheets hanging out to dry. We seem to believe

Having said in no certain way that we are not certain it is possible.

DENIED

They told everyone. They needed discovery, insight.

When we came home from work underwater,

More often, they sold anesthetics. They were asking for it

We told them. You can't have it. They persisted

What idiocy.

Why keep going?

There is nothing good anymore. This is all foolishness. When the sun rose it rose and rose and it kept rising until it was a flower and then it was nothing but itself but itself but itself but by itself it is nothing but itself And they told everyone

They needed this discovery that they were nothing but themselves.

He stayed out of it, of course. He didn't want to GET INVOLVED.

AN ANTHOLOGY OF FICTIONS

It was a house with many rooms, just like this one.

As I came back, crossing the lawn,

Where we went with one another

To think and twist the matter, the house

Sticking out here and there from the usual plastering

Of doors windows shutters bricks and what not,

I usually thought, incongruously, of ducks

An idiot's swarm of ducks

On small brown rivers, these on fire

These issuing somehow from the pockets of an overweight god.

Why have you come back?

To torment me?

FATE

Around the coming corner was a man waiting.

Here, for the last few days, he waited

Ignoring a view of trolleys and modern buildings.

We will have been deceived with a new vigor

For the hundredth time

After the confetti has shaken itself loose

And the drinks emptied and the old feelings wash.

Regardless, the idea of being anywhere remotely like it

Grows over the season. The ducks settle on frozen ponds

Near the trees breaking the view of modern buildings.

Until we feel ready to abscond, a still-perfect possibility

We might not make it in time, for all we know, somewhere else

WINTER

With it our sense of making

What we knew could not really love us back

Had us coming back

To the window. It is a nice touch.

Snow. Presence. Accumulation.

It feels like an emptying out

Full of things. The children flop and flail into angels

With enthusiastic gestures of laughter.

Still, it was not with irony we called this composition winter

But it has always seemed like it was the least thing worth saying

And now it's come out again

Sorrowing and estranged, but requiring our handling, our care

Though long we've been tired of the sequence, out and in, out and in

Suppose one might get away

But would it be dangerous

Going, the roads ahead? It really does seem like it. Suppose

Something else happens.

Something cold, something instilled

Very much like an expectation

Or the security officer who has detained you

Is impersonating a security officer

With the intent to induce you to submit

To his pretended authority

This could be like a new poem, quite unlike its subject

Or this could be like any poem

And this is not like lying in ambush.

The first spectacle was falling from beams.

There they say

You’d be happy here

I’d like a word with you

To be felt among them

Lights inside of cars

Music inside of cars

It has happened before

And the oldness of our lives

Sometime numerous details

Accumulates, is washed out, brightened

By presence, from deeper cause

PREAMBLE

The mules are whining forever.

It is replaced, or rather, forever

Shadows the hand's rabbit, someone’s

Whose face is by turns built

Of inadmissible satisfactions. It says

Nothing. One suspects there are glass

Flocks and shepherds on the mellow hills,

Moving freely, but not in the right way.

The anxious birds suggestive of

Ominous feelings, fly into its place

The handsome electric advertising

You are constantly asked to explain  

A difference for, of which there is no kind

Extant. Bedding material and oddities

Wrapped and stashed, and the slight

Of a once disregarded sweetness

Returned, except of the parade that across

It makes discontent explicit. Its detectives

Interrupt one another. Occupied vocabularies

Are gone, the spaces light up

The monument, the way the public

Conceives monuments for vistas,

The curious way. A young boy and girl

Feed each other slowly boiled peanuts

ON ARUBA

There is joy in proceeding impatiently through evidence.

Perhaps I don't know what it is that enraptures me when you

Relax. The distance that's been removed from all the pictures?

There is something else delicate in the way children

Surround one another? And the light? Though there isn't any left

This is its expunging? Yet hadn’t the thought of it not being

Eternal been theirs? It had to have been lost because they found it

In the aquarium they stood near? And all of this was pressing

The receive button in instant message? Paradise is bad

For children unable to image search zinnias? For sure, though

Those who knew the language of the island refused? Even if

Beating at the edge of things an unrelieved drum triumphed?

THE MAP

The necessity goes first, then there is a whole heap else

To do badly. Or is it quickly?

Say you look around and that’s it

Or much of it, or so much of it.

About these buildings you wish to include concrete.

But how? The necessity for concrete goes first.

Then the necessity for men in hard hats, with tools, goes the way the buildings  

Or much of what you talk about is of little necessity?

The plane you arrive on nods in the air. Like arranged lines

People take pauses. No Imputing, they say. You are given the good stuff

Here is your luggage, and, and then, of course the first step of going, it all bothers you.

You prance and lisp and say nice things.

Around the tawdry buildings women sit and listen

To guitars in the city. The city gangs up while then the first note

Is all that has bothered you. It must be a note of magnificence

Or is it its difference, its being not magnificent, where a reassuring

Gesture is having a slip of the tongue. The chord changes to dusk

Holding over everyone like a dark umbrella. And to be recovered

Of everything the sun gathered in to listen around you, you sing

The praises no one had not asked for. For you, they believed, they were all waiting

And then something else happened. Say you get around to naming it

Or much of what you talk about is getting lost in your trying to name it

It seems our duty to bestow squarely on our targets certain designations

Recover what does not want for returning

And what do we want for return? Misfortunes

Growing up? Precautions? A spoiled life

Viciously miniscule? The feet plant

Themselves yet do not find measure, or context, for the first step

With which to be angry is also the last, yet

They appear okay getting going like the kids are going

I mean, the necessity in the severe sense of living like a child

Forgetting among slabs of concrete, carriages, and the Platz

Where the clues, the strange genital markings discourage the innocent

Glass buildings of their reflection. I mean the mood is still returning

I mean I am from an urban environment I mean the necessity goes first

Much there is that can and for that I am a little grateful

Much there is that can't and for that I am a little grateful

Much there is that will and for that I am a little grateful

Much there is that won't and for that I am a little grateful

Much there is that shouldn't and for that I am a little grateful

Much there is that can't not and for that I am a little grateful

THE KIDS

but in order the first is always audible, the second, a wrecked whisper

a clot, dust and smothering. They are preparing the podium for a glass of water

to give their parents the clearest path to understanding, the presentation includes

the heat of the moment, in which they will weep again

over the marvelous images the light makes on the wall, they salute

a pennant of light, the hues of dusk falling, they read and crouch

under gold haloes, the children of the past wear bangles, steal pink and white impatiens

from old photo albums, in which they will run again

like this family at hand, in predictable attire, in their backyard, bathed in a dim light

the clouds come over their roofs expanding, faces lifted toward the grandeur

breaking light about the place a whiff of defection, where huge rotating platforms and sails

cut across the water viewed from the patio

PRIESTLY

though the river is but one example

with its small polished stones

in its bed, its ripples, and philosophical examples

I mean here at beach scenes more polished, ivory-eyed

tigers stalk and discover lovers in the saw grass

fugitives who kept morning in closets, New York

horrible for sea-breezes and the blood-soaked sand

who cloistered here to gather waves with names for difficulty

they starved themselves wild with great difficulty

not for the occasional burst of fireworks but something

pale, like an empty champagne bottle, the hushed

tide through the window quelled, how awful

sprawled across all this light the while

has come to appear in the glass inappropriate

but in an order the first is always audible

blankness, light, the second light mellowing as hues lengthening

in the coming dusk, stranded on your eyelids, you blink

you blink, you must go among the stranded cups

your greatness demanded

what was really his, that you could show her him

and possess him through her, here, before evening