Red weather tigers skulk drunk sailors
in dreams of the suspended men,
the hopes of the men in red suspenders.

The thin women in their awkward heels
never received the awaited postcard from Vesuvious,
their knockoff Hermes scarves in a thousand knots,
tied in a thousand knots, a thousand knots,
a wilted rose.

And some hobble, some smirk and lift both arms,
point at the red wall, point at the green wall,
and there are so many words written and lost
in the books, the books, in the books.

The books oppress.
Clever sculptures,
clever sculptures oppress.

The rinomato regents of their demesne
trim their grey soul patches
into perfect little grey triangles.
They want to dance with their silver canes
but they can’t dance with silver canes.
They can barely walk in clodhopper suits,
grayish suits, these garish suits
don’t account for accouter contradictions.

Plaintive poets sing sad jeremiads at the memorials
of other sad dead poets, all in their own remembrance.
Words exchanged, in fact, the words are harvested like flax,
flax from which to extract linseed oil, linseed oil to bind paint
or putty tears shaped rough-hewn from the carved out tracks
scratched down coarse and pallid willow wooden cheeks,
these cricket bat faces with their long droop tongues sagging,
tongues that prolong chin waggling. Chinwag drool dribbles
past wattle chins, past screeching sprats murdering spiderlings
still cocooned asleep in dangling webs, past pink stickers
stuck on bicycle helmets and past discarded popsicle sticks,
past the shrill glee of innocents, innocence bored with death.

Luthiers could not be more proud when their fingers cramp.

And always watching, watching the eccentrics,
the bicorned outsider, j’accused! Brown Recluse.
His right hooked-tailed boot famous since Munich,
the left distracts attention with a belled wheel spur.

Words flutter past him, ghost of words, torpid words.
Oh they talk, they move their mouths, even smile.
But they also recoil and roil at his presence, indignant.

He knows what they can’t do and they know what he can do.
They know what they can’t do and also know what he can do.
So they show their teeth, a woman even adjusts her pelisse.

In another time they would condemn him to death by lapidation
and tell themselves that they saved the rest of the children.
Death by interminable trepidation is just death by isolation
and this is all that they have learned since they were children.

And he watches, watches the calculations of these eclectics.
They flit and turn and curtsy. They forget who eats hogs.
They burp the onomatopoeia of thunder. Rattapallax.
Excuse me. No. Excuse you.

On me dit que le destin se moque bien de nous.
Serais ce possible alors?

We exemplify the dull disillusionment of scholars
and blind rabbits humping mounds of grass.
Vintage dresses always fray first at crotch level,
fray from all that subconscious touching and rubbing.

Why resent the black beast when all he wants to do
is blanch and evaporate while walking to Wichita?