Waits for my Stiga in the mail:
Aces black, that’sa color for the tack
see, I’ve read it in TT forums.
My closing months here, I saw hail
last year, raining down on the train & track.
Now I’s into driver decorums—
Four days till the Collected Works are due.
In that room, four days droop like two.
It’s Tues & I want to loop
or at least hop a shower soon.
I handle my hot tea, anxious to renew
while whistling the This Old Man tune.
Yawn: where go January, Neil & Fran?
Al in his own private Hong Kong
but that’s one I know better than.
Forty-odd & more if I can I can
waltz in the wind as if nothing’s wrong
with the bell tower song.
The night air hot, Berliners tre thick today
With brotherly love, I had asked them to show me
the hottest new jams, & the second hottest band
out of Germany. Jay Ayayay had a proper
level (& a name), he expressed with his hands.
Some abysmal sort ah techno played,
there was embarassment & refusal,
two drunks made a scene of Philly at
the loud intersection: an in/outdoor bar.
His glass shouldn’t have been refilled at all.
I blew up smoke at bat,
& dreamt on the couch with a ‘cigar.’
Nothin’ wrong with one taboo, we lied,
Al with his duck-walk heil, all were appalled.
‘No brains’ was Jay’s exact reply,
but of course no American would rightly in their mind—
mixes of our speech made it up the hall.
We played German scrabble without the Y’s.
Ol’ gal never got to know him
any more than what cleared those years
together. ‘Babe’ was often what I called.
Blue fingers twitching in
the dark, she has someone to tell her fears:
grad school approaching, summers abroad,
health issues with a family heart.
I knew her through spending time apart,
& I feel as if I’ve reached every end
of every anxious day spent.
Signing a cross on his chest: charts
miles, man. Cars came & went.
Tonight much of the same: No game
as game. Stumbling again into her warm
words, our humor n/ever bland.
—O this corner I’m finding lame
& not conducive to my poems. Quivering hand,
heart rapid, I stretch out my left arm—
