11

The tall half-empty glass
Of Night

Uncovers spiders beneath
The radiotower.

A star falls.
People sigh simultaneously in separate houses.

The road like a wet
Taxi, is popular,

And like a functional
Handgrenade, relentless.

The crying family
Of buildings, only sweeps

Over car-strapped
Eyes; the whole place becomes

A blur
Of lights, signs, switches, and other languages.

Like a neon narcotic Monet,
The whole suburban vista shines

A forlorn blurry quarter
Teeming with chattering bacteria

At the bottom of a bottle
Before the milkman comes before the postman

Who comes before no man but always serves
The State well after the Sun

Casts its Protestant rays over
The glorious green dumpsters of America

And Holland and Micronesia
Until some giant cranky overfed child comes again

To tip the cow and start the whole
Axe-grinding erection of towers, the crying spilling dying all over again.

And thence commences the tortuous measuring of the flowers
By the light of the machine-quenched

Moon, as motorcycles peel-out, spelling out
Hilarious doom.

And Old Daisy sweeps up with her broom
The cracked yellow paint-chips of coffee-stained day.

Well, drivers never honk soon enough.
It makes me wonder why they bother.

Is it because they think it will get them to their father
Faster

Like sailors who, railing at the nuclear sea
To get them home, throw each other overboard.

The plashing waves of the highway
At high tide, seaweed hangs over

Exit signs -- Route 22; I-94 --
Glowing in blurs and fractions

As we pass, laughing,
Radio blasting in a miniature

World on wheels,
Sending multiverses of thought aloft

Through cannibalized night
And the vast bright

Profane candles of factories
Light our way of eyes

Over landscape, steelscape,
But keeps the stars

From filling mind and dream with
More glorious primitive Real

To transform collective space
Into a kaleidoscope of voices, the Earth into a green and rusty theatre-in-the-round

Filled with electric potential
And coffee, tomatoes, guitars, corn, milk, beauty, clocks, balloons, bread.

But that is the dream from here: Sleep,
Falling through space, unknown and illegible.