"From the time he had shoes, he roamed the neighborhood."

--Nik Cohn "Tricksta: Life and Death and New Orleans Rap"


Defective and partly invisible
as the pagination of a yellow thesis
loosening like dream-teeth
or niblets blackening on the grill--
a study of piracy as much as trade,
of simony as much as privacy,
of property as much as specie,
thus an alum farmer of Yorkshire
is exempted from impressement
by the same principle as sugar bled
from a tree implies crystallisation,
not seeing its fate in the sticky Smitty's window
the summer not quite even over.

For the monthly purpose
of re-upping the state of emergency and toward
the interpretation of shipwrecks
we will assemble in this playhouse
by the light of a gibbous moon--
and not a crumb or shred or maccaroon
of what is said will leave this room...

Alka-seltzer stars scattered on blue felt,
the good warm smell of a dog smoking a cigar
with Lady Luck and her 52 imaginary friends
found curled in the ditches with coffee ends,
no one wants the burnt dregs of the last car
with a hole burnt through or to eat their phone.
Everyone just wants to go home.