69

FLASH PICTURES FROM THE TOP OF THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING

The engine lights of a jet are twinkling
Right through the light on the Woolworth Building
It's a mixture o flucks
To work on the thirtieth floor in a cubicle.
Like most bee winners I hate spelling things out.
Rhymes, puns, midtown; all ugly things stir me.
The rain does well for itself with the songwriters;
The blue sky with poets and strobe-lit securities dealers;
But for me whatever I am it's got to be overcast to mean business,

My helicopter need to hang around
That questionable turquoise Shulamith's
Slumming vagabondish through
A silly apprenticeship to the vendettists
The plausible handles counter-baron
Engaging in a typewritten cleansing
Of the great troika bell,
Pace the distance from here to a thousand
Irrelevant interruptions, am I impressed
By mindreading or the clatter
Taught in a basket, a seminar
Virgins climb over each other
To hover year-like and year-like vanish
Abruptly in the middle of a holiday
Having snuck off to where the coats are kept.
"That's funny, there's a maidenhead on my coat."

The lawyers going as fast as they can
Like rice, and me doing likewise my best,
Mourning a glowing light a glowing
Feeling in the storms look
The day, with feathers in its hair
And on its sidewalk, has broken
And while it would be flattering and exciting
To say poetry has come bursting forth

What it does is ooze -- oh for that
Warm metal taste in my mouth
That is not blood, and the swollen
Feeling seizing both of us like contraband.
You know I can't wait to hear the Brahms
With you even if I'll be sitting all that way
But I've seen you in enough different light
The color copy of you nine months in

The cold is back, that I love,
Returned from August at the Gaspe peninsula
And the red truck of Wing-Gong Laundry
Is happy about it with me, turning
Of Barrow onto West Fourth, Christopher's
Name in the straight world, the one
Whose border I straddle if nothing else