One two-bit nightery with chessboard in the back.
A snare drum, a pump, the rubble pile of a palace.
Siamese traps, and pink cocktail umbrellas
for the little blowsy ones who tramp the boulevards
and blue byways of my interior, tapping the asphalt
with their parasol tips, unfurling their wings
to fly the Queen, tipping their fedoras to show their holes.
All day they pull cotton from inhalers that come down my conveyor.
But in my night, they bolt home and lock it tight, and move inward,
and begin to sniff by their basins, and whimper
We feel a first liquid now coming down the fuchsia
We hear Opal, we feel the bloodpump slow
Our lice awaken and slide to the wings
We nurse them with our holes, we love in his marrow
We snake out pipes, make rounds with caulk guns
Before dawn, debauched,
they try to stroke me to sleep in the bath . . .
High noontide in my interior: the red deer
wends out of my ravine when I wave, the gilled goat.
The shadows of my Frenchmen annihilate my little night-womps.
In my back-of-the-eyelid cinema: arabesques.
My best records are each hiss or moan or tremolo.
Your shadow annihilates my little day-womps.
Languor keeps my body from the desk.
Languor keeps the stockings on your legs.
Glare keeps the little ones at the conveyor
and out of the head . . . but then, from way off, with cranking
comes my night, and when it arrives
I go to it like a callboy to a C-note.
by Jeff Clark (b. 1971)
