infandum, regina, iubes renovare dolorem

                                              What employment have we here?
                                                                               —Richard LaPauvre

Having set into such sureties unconscious as youth, dispensations in accord
with the putting forth and natural talent, I thought I deserved such deserts, life
but for the living, wide empty grin into early late age, for whatever time be

accorded, when at last I lapsed onto the stinking plain where now you find me,
the opposite of clarity and health. All I remember was struggle, listening was
most difficult, yet had I not seen, I asked, the worst? The world turned forever

further from my favor for all reply. Imagine a wall clothed in velvet, studded
with the portraits of famous whores. In arrangement, delicate and ominous,
a constellation of mal-intent, organs painted on the black, blood-drop of sky, each

artist selected for attributes most closely aligned with whore, or in interesting
and exciting juxtapositions of artistic temperament determined by a quicksilver
intelligence, sinistro. Each portrait signed both by artist and whore. At any rate

it seems to vibrate, a malicious fervor beneath the banal. Now I find razors hidden
in my most tender habits, rats slicing anklebones before I can beat 'em back.
They're as large as a house. Absurd. How come I keep finding myself lost?

This sufferin' business, boss, is getting to be the best of me yet, an old song
already, maybe not, fate yet kicking my bony arse about this farcical stage wherw
young and old might meet, pretending to discuss what's in between. Another

grammarian, another funeral, I'd have them say, rather than go into these last
years of life's walk-around darkness, as though in some else's dream where
the lock of night is broken open and suddenly that wall of famous whores makes 

sense: burlesque of birth caught on sky's horns, life lost in senseless grief down
stations of pain, wandering before will's indifference, poised with its empty grin.
Listen, you'll never see it coming, what you can count on, woven into fortune's fabric, each pattern 

its nature entire and its nature malign, if mine be the measure.

Not that he saw so well 

         nostri quaerunt sibi vulnus ocelli
                                   —Propertius II, xxii, 7

nor far, nor near, but that he saw
too much and with a registration such 
that each edge opened and swallowed him
entire, the world a mouth of flames. 
Not that he heard so well but that 
the damning regularity of each stroke, 
each character's utterance, the dread horror 
of its predictability, drove him to wharf 
and tossed him, boiling, in. Nor could 
smell, touch, or taste, each dimmed 
by age, mistaking the putrid "envelope" 
of his surroundings, like the memory 
of a body missing from a trunk still
leaking. Sometimes like rolling 
a fifty-gallon drum half-filled with 
liquid up hill then down a sudden
incline. Sometime it'll nail his balls to
the wall, or tear open his scrotum along 
the seam. Then everything will pour in.


 

Whammy									

leaning in a window, on sill with elbows, head 
into room, house of your life already gone out in
its living no doubt, hands ready to light a match, his
head is Nixon's, goober with weighted jowl, now 
he's shuffling a deck, speaking with the casual air
of someone who's been there, i.e., before, has seen 
things, or enough, fortune at his fingertips, he's ready, 
. . . pasteboards pitched into streams they themselves
create in turn, riding a slice of instant's way gliding, arcing, then
turning and banking, rotating into fate, but by then his hands 
are animals speaking to one another, mouth to mouth, yucking it
up, he wants me to understand, but his face becomes the fame 
of women, or two womanly forms, heads where his eyes
had been (what difference between looking and seeing 
and watching all the time and what might that mean to what
you understand, lighted speech?, shapes wandering darkness
of his being, warm, feminine, he is from the world, you
realize, leaning in, as emissary leans into something 
already said in granite mind . . . but now he looks like 
a gameshow host, ageless as toxins writhe just beneath
his face, being cast in fell design, yet he is all yours.