At the Institute of Haiku-Induced
Orgasm, the reading was nearly over
before it began. In Iowa City, when
my friend read his poem about styling
his dead mother’s wig, it was like
he was the only member of our tribe
with a heart that still worked. I wonder,
Does anyone hear the Hare Krishnas
outside passing near? At the Center
for Useless Experimentation, my poem
about sick swans went over big although
no one caught that it was really about
Keats’s tuberculosis.
After five minutes in the Writers’ Gaggle
to benefit a citywide neutering
by the ASPCA, the woman who read
about her genitals handcuffed
to the Washington Monument
asked if I could believe there was nothing
to drink. Nope, but everyone knows
at least one story of Dylan Thomas
hitting the orchestra pit and Dionysus
throwing up all over his blue tunic.
The lamb on his shoulder doesn’t
have a head. Dirty dirty dirty, intones
Cotton Mather into the microphone.
Sylvia Plath: head of a Roman emperor,
lips of Tinker Bell. The lamb on her shoulder
doesn’t have a head. Antonin Artaud,
not someone you’d expect in charge
but here he is, in charge:
zzzzpktzzzzzzzzzzzpktzzzpktpkttt
as if the forces of the cosmos are still
Chainsaw rackmold tungsten noose. Okay,
I’m convinced but something still seems missing.
The white answer never fits the white
question. In New York, at the Council
for Public Poetry Safety, the great-eared,
glassy-winged elder says he remembers me
from Arizona although I’ve never been to Arizona.
Ah, Arizona, I try to convey into his bushy eyeholes,
buggy narcotic vulvaular windswept idyllic screwed-up Arizona,
since then I’ve not been the same.
The winter morning is a stone
written upon by evaporation.
The summer evening a sheet
on which a thousand poets try to sleep.
One reads for an hour about
the brain surgery of her horse,
another weeps, cluing in the audience,
and a coat falls away from the other coats
as if with great effort. In the case of helium,
first they knew it was there then
they found it. With the electron,
first they found it then
it proved not to be there.