John Milton Blues

 

Tumid boughs weigh the fruits,
split with impact on the bricks
below. Purple blown flowers

moved between the wind, with the moistness
of yesternight's rain. Nightmare, which
bunged a year's anxieties

into a half-hour of staring fright:
connections lost, distance
uncovered, ignored responsibilities:

glossy magazine lineup of imploring
harelipped children. The war
drones on in the background like

an ill-fitting clock. Morning
would diffuse light into leaves,
host of blinking, shifting spots

of blindness at play over the constant
grinding of some machinery
or some other. Fuelled with fluid.

Fluid signatures stroked but not
unsigned, checks not yet
in the mail. As if an armored

peace had settled down
over the torse of the peninsula,
turning the dog's eye and lion's

tongue into silence, breathless.
A sound akin mosaic. Concentration
ardor slips, loses time, pops off

into a premature inhalation.
I anticipate your touch at times
to the bottom of my perplexity.

The crisp and washed expanse
of exurban lawns to flash
by the windows of our muscular

speeding cars. Anticipate crowd-calls
and sullen laptopped, multi-tasked
attention. Concatenation ardor

like tongues of fire burning scales
off eyes or some damned thing.
Whose name has dropped off

my leaking PDA. Lucky PMS.
And kudos to the plucky young ones
who've hacked their way

out of an overcast weekend into
a bright future. If you talk constantly
about money, that means you're all

money's interested in. (Poetry
is a kind of money, but money's
after all a kind of sex. Or vice-versa.)

There's a pylon down the street
to measure incoming airplanes' decibel
levels. Good sounds to me.

The senses variously drawn from line
to dotted line, fences that shelve
us off from our hungry neighbors

who might take away our stuff.
That man wants your money.
So you tripped him up, showed him

which end went where and how many
fingers it really takes to make
a fist, though most punches

these days get lost somewhere in the tubes
and wires of internetted social
space. So much talk of free will,

quaint and almost risible relict
of some underdetermined
stone age, when Dad could pop

the hood and tell you why
the engine didn't go. No need
to change the oil of our wondrous

self-lubricating market machine
so long as there's a queue
of dropouts and fuckoffs waiting

to open their veins into a funnel
over the whirring cogs and wheels.
(Getting a bit burned out

on the clockword metaphors,
old son.) One's whole life like
a hunk of dry-cured ham, and yourself

keeps dipping off and changing the soak,
salty as ever. Nothing like a sunny,
breezy afternoon to blow off melancholia,

though: the playground equipment shines
like a wheelbarrow in primary colors,
no splinters from a picnic table

pressed out of recycled plastics. Tenacious
and fiercely territorial ants (provident
emmet) will crawl your wrists

and ankles, remind you and your children
that all's not yet petrochemical
culture. He wrote it blind, feeling

the next expansive period
on his pulses, as the subdued noise
and crisping air told him

night from day. The experience
of defeat, a regularly marked
fencepost for the merchants of Utopia –

for whom nothing less than the City
of God, superimposed on Berkeley
or Des Moines, will do. Count

your blessings, girls and boys,
close your eyes and pray, stretch
out on your pallets and think

of patria: it's a finical, untrustworthy
dark out there, but then again.
A band of thunderstorms moved east

across swamps pavements and trailer
parks, us thinking only of our individual
leaks. Mosh-pit discourse, where ideas

and invective bounce off one another, come
to rest pressed against the crowd,
sweaty bloody breathing heavily.

But blindman he takes an idea, tumbled
and polished like an amateur's stone, sets
down and follows it inevitable out.

The woods are full of lucky bastards
like that, shuffling behind trees
and peering out of bushes. Enough time,

enough energy, and we'd be there
as well. Two plastic children's slides,
side by said but jaunty out

of parallel: light and shade, a switch
I wish you'd effing stop
flicking: pillows stained with hollow

coughing, the berry-magenta
drip of flavored lozenges.
That particular cough felt something

like a fist, a disconnection notice, final
warning – where's your surrealism now,
as they hustle you into the next room

stifling shocked sobs? Electronic
klaxon, repeating synthesized
and spinning co-co-rico-co.

Premising rain. Damp gust, or
money sieving through the smallest
membrane imaginable

into the bloodstream at large.
The body politic shooting up
on petroleum, which you won't see

on the New Yorker's cover. I'd guess
we need a prophet, though I'd
settle for a smiling prophetess

with blue eyes brains
of steel and large soft breasts.
Hyacinth hair, they say, because

of the clust'ring ringlets. Sere remains
of the potted basil by the pool
pump: extension cords laid

over dry ground, ant-crossed
sand, naked to the welkin. A licorice
tin of hobbyist's tumbled stones.

 

 

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