Celebrated for uncertain construction
The bulbs, cords, and slats
Making their way east
Spreading webbed canvas
Finding the power supply
Doing the medieval math
Making boxes do their jobs
Ensuring the grit
For one more season
With knowledge of the creep
Slow bleed toward Montauk
Probably calling it a day
In Riverhead
As the Bridgehampton crowd knows
Why meddle with petty
When you can learn trapeze
Off the beaten
In a park
With sturdy studs
And worthy planks
And sturdy chaps to firmly grab
All the frame that has become
Mary, Jack, and Cindy
Good dogs play on the grass below
Off the leash
And don't go far
The nearest highway
Back in Riverhead
Even so
This Cuckoo Haus
Will provide and console
Festering with multiple coats of open wound
1982 bleeding through
When scraped down to the third layer
Someday the real excavation can take place
Crying in unison at about the sixth layer
Sometime around 1993
In a cage called the Zipper
You were so beautiful
and misunderstood
Eskimo eyes
So soft
With crackling shell
Bouncing around like gumballs
In a gumball machine
In a semi full of quarter jackers
Wasted on elixirs
Happy to share
Waiting until the zenith was reached
To sneak a kiss with tongue
But crawling through the makeshift halls
Always trying to go upside down
Anticipating the big finish
Is never as spectacular
As the combined dramas
Exclusive and permitted
Laid out in a mess of screws and bolts and steel pipe
Banded together with cable
And laid in the center of a canvas throw
To be wrapped and prepared
With color identification attached at the corner
A number a letter a tag
Thrown in a truck
For a three mile haul
The gaps creating closure
A deep inhale
Only to be released
When a new story can be scratched
Into the lead and lacquer
The combined breaths
A forgotten eternity
A blackened lung
A crooked limp
A forgery the Bridgehampton crowd may never get to inspect
Your shoe's untied
Gotcha
--
5.7.09
Comments
The highways pulsing with their guiding glow;
Home or homeward bound, we think;
While the tinge of eternity - of death rides shotgun
Like the forgetful memory of Eskimo eyes and the glance caress of a kissy-face.
A doorway to death - this ride was
If it was anything else,
And a crooked, boney finger points out of the window, saying passionately,
"I want to touch every one of them."
Cuckoo Haus for us to think that
This may be our lot;
Becoming destitute for them,
And, yet ...
You move me, if only me,
My friend.