I saw in an old building that shield you wore and Byron was outside in 
the window with his elbow over the sill like a movie neighbor, or a man
in Miami waiting for word from a Woman. 

Ignored Poebirds in inchoate towers screeched at an incautious head.
Inside a cadenza of a man shaped like Fatty Arbuckle (maker of hallways) 
told us Elvis had not left this building. 

Then, a nexus: NYC brought me a prize gamine girl who was socially ill
yet vowed a hatred of alcoholics. You see, poets make good pets. I drank
a beer by a purple car thinking, "I'm coming back, I'm coming back."
The spot where John Lennon was shot, dark in the quiet night of October first. 

A member of the cognoscenti in Kansas City is translating all 245 episodes
of The Love Boat into ancient Greek. He does this wearing only tennis shoes
and a black leather tam - calls me for assistance with the more obscure
idioms - we agonize over certain passages in the fragile original and both
go crazy with expectations of how this may well help those people.  

Even so -- or perhaps, therefore -- I wound up at Dr. Alfalfar's office. He gave
me some pills he said were the Bronx Pelham Parkway. "Take one fifty-minute
drive by blue water before bedtime;" and it cleared up The Horrors, The Fear,
and The Black Dream - but it has not been effective in treating the oriental
Sick House Syndrome of Mr. Sib Ling, nor the hideous Pique Bug's Bile from
The South. Tonight I shall ask, in future tense, the Medicine Man part of whose
job description is to find the approximately 1 to 10 murderers who will have
caused any death in his village. He's closer than you think, my friend; and are
you going to tell his entire village of believers that he's bonkers?     

Returning one day from The Chicago Worlds' Fair S. & D. decided to do
the matchmaking they had planned now for so long. The dipsomaniac
neighbor lady of urban legend was carted off to Oz, and made presentable
for to meet the Friendly Man who had threatened to take an alien, Stage 4, 
wife out of dreaded dire lonely neediness. The happy new-lie-Webs now
run a bistro in Queens, NY, where they enjoy brisk trade from College Point
Yacht Club with one dog in the fo'c'sle - folderol all along the tales o' John
Barleycorn. ["keep it real in the fiel(d), righ'?"]. 

In nighttimes the slight splash slapping and loon loss of Flushing Bay caresses
their cove-home as inside lovers slip a little claret between lips of bare feet;
she with her ocean-voyages-planning charts and comely parts, and he sketching
stories for E-Queen Magazine and True Crime & Romance Fiends Monthly --
a rendering of sampler content. The glistening whispering in your nervous system
no longer nails on blackboard under the wine planes from La Guardia. Content
lulls them to sleep, in the dream-laden keeps of that nocturne, New York.


© W.D. Brindle
 ________________
 Home: www.gobi-igloo.com
 Work: www.esperancesp.com