& afterwards.
The carnal is one type of aesthetic display
a little hamlet can suffer through.
Along with all the body’s meta-meta-metaphors,
from transients to the Department of Public Health.
There are so many reasons I’m not there.
So many reasons to let that lazy sentence
stand as substitute for work I should want to do.
I should want to toil those imaginary fields.
For they are imaginary fields, many, by now.
That’s where a good deal of the tension lies.
All fields catch fire.
That’s not so dire.
I got to be the toast of C Street
for a while, the bee of The Beehive on B Street.
There was no A to speak of.
Besides.
It was a B kind of town, wasn’t it?
An exhibition to celebrate the humble prune.
Six stories high, the grand hotel.
That’s the gamut, dammit.
Minus the gore. I had to spare you the gore.
How else could I lead you this far,
except to pretend that nothing perishes, especially
matters that disturb the heart.
Ah, the heart …
What is the heart but a boob, anyways,
that it should hang out at the rodeo arena,
long after the bulls have been roped.