146

LIKE A SHEEP ON THE SIDE OF A HILL

It must be a different life
Being the one taking someone
Into the store where the bolt
Along the wall flutter as the bell
Is followed by Can I help you

These all must be different lives
Never at the point of sale
If never answering How's that going
With a sound more articulate
Than what a sheep says at the onset of rain

Mezuzot by the elevator
Throb and whipcrack
In the fluorescent bulb

That was the song
Of being there
Living not beside the point
But making light
And seeing fair
Shoveled joint
It won't belong

That was the time
Of quiet song
The jacket days
Inside of rhyme
That blast of leaf
The cost repays
Baa, baa, baa

The playbill gong
Compares its story
To the song
And has an essay
Nothing's wrong
Beggars belief
And won't belong

Stating in thick "I"s
Tobacco rock rest
Your face in the mirror

Hey excited feeling
Take off your shoes
And play with me a while

I doesn't understand
And never relies

The little list droning
Is packing its brief
Interruptions into a soft
Someone studying
Up against you

Soda can with gerber daisies
Take your process to the Alps
Mint is on the baby's mind
Chase the plane
Launch the more or less
Into the side of the sun

Give me the chan brain
Zen bran for a clam

Got a storing real
In a mojo pasha
Travel scribble
Affictionate complait
The tinsel removal

I sensed the affect
Gravitating toward
The soft feeling
Elbow to elbow in the salt

The please freak
Sees through the explosion
Of nice pinata disguise!
O insight you make me
Loot for walking

O vocative! whatcha
Got in the museum bag?

Briefcase on my lap
Are you my long lost desk?
Stereo in the store
Staring in the store

This quadrilateral attitude
Belittles all feng shui,
Predicates its classwork
On improv and AV

The drugs of the girl
Equal girls' drugs
Belated camerata
Stop asking me where
God puts faded things

Finding in
The glamor glommer glimmer,
What could be glummer

Mozart in the elevator
Nothing to be gained
By shouldering, shouldering

The pen goes
Where it feels like
Books pave the easement

I go where I feel
Something soft ignoring
And admiring
The percussion of bone
All the unyielding languages
Play with giving me truth

Navigable
Navigable
Navigable

Dad, quesadillas
Are experience and so are
Anklets -- the musical!

Dad, quesadillas
Are experience and so are
Anklets -- the movie!

Waiter, there's an anklet
in my quesadila -- t-shirt

Standing on the crowd
And waiting for the morning

This complacent
Fifteen minute interval
The indoor logic of which
Is looking at the
Smoke of the wedding
From thirty miles off
While there
In the dictionary heart
All memory of hurrying
Along the sodium shadows
Up and down broken sidewalk
And the soft smell
Of beer flowers
Alarmed away

The speed and halt
Of the bow
Prop up
The pow

It can't linger in the
Demand to wait under
The shark light

When I was subsumed
Into the clavicle
This reeling -- was I aiming?

He gets the newspaper
A day after everyone else

Kenneth is gone
My marriage is over
Two babies lost
I am homeless
And on the edge of drinking too much

I am writing more than for years
Two books coming
Everybody wants work

Mosquito bites on my knuckles
And the soles of my feet

I have enough pants
To get through the week
At the job I will keep

Kenneth is gone
My marriage is over
Two babies lost