TYPICAL
Days after the circus sun
on sidewalk cafés makes good
on marriage as a prospect
the bespectacled Japanese tourist
giggles two-faced into a camera
full of street organ, uniforms all
smiles for a firing squad stuttering
refugee, surreptitious North African
hissing smack, coke, ecstasy,
swallowing when he sees her
on Father’s thick umbilical cord,
stolen mouth headscarf-framed,
frozen with the rest by the second-
year film school student while in the bar
a woman, sociable and functional,
45 years young, seeks ditto man,
but he’s on Amsterdam’s narrowest thoroughfare
unable to take his eyes off a wayward dildo
between the breasts of a faded Venezuelan
who, sexy and sad, ignores the sight
of two energetic, indifferent boys
French-kissing, trembling granny swears
because there’s never any letters,
but this evening she’ll see the queen,
she never forgets Remembrance Day,
and the philosophy student will smirk
at the speech after beating the odds
yet again by not drowning in the canal
where tour boats treat tourists to
mellifluous emetics and pigeons
shit all over the station or peck
seeds they take for granted from the square,
know they’re admired, don’t care,
like the junkie on the tram
caught with his hand in a pocket
by committed commuters whose outraged
innocence trumps the intern
chafing at the driver’s one-liner about
the house on your left where J.
puts his feet up in summer, deliberately
asks for guilders, and doesn’t get a thing
or bills or a cigarette from an Italian,
just fingered a red-hot schoolgirl
in a toilet and another child off
on adventures in the department store
hears his name at last and that
his mother (in the Society Shop, madame
does not doff her shades, the frames, you see)
is waiting (where’d they say again?) while he’s
all smiles for glumly nodding officers,
sunbed-bronzed, beating their way
to a frisk in the park, where the poet,
after research in death notices,
carves his name in a bench,
reconsiders, carves his name
in every tree in the row—