Eyewitness Travel Guide’s Tale
Penny hasn’t got a penny
Danny boy doesn’t give a damn
Daisy goes cruising in a frenzy
Tintin was erected by the men
No one in the country has ever heard
of a hydroelectro eco-friendly dam in China
Everybody goes drinking in pubs
Happiness is tattooed on calves and foreheads
Peaches taint the sun tans and
Leeches bleach the foreskins
Skinheads go dancing in the twilight with the la-la girls
Tarzan goes aping himself in a comedy show on late-night
television
Harley dreams of killing himself but doesn’t do it for some reason
Jasmine blossoms through cracks in fences, can’t get fired at work
Holy churches the uncles bring Inessa to see
in the mountainous countryside of Italy
but all she wants is to put her feet up and sleep!
Castles, sunflowers, bagpipes, maps
of canals, streets, bridges, alps, and
evergreen forests, German beers and sausages, caryatids
with enormous draperies and tits, Inuits moving
South into bungalows next to glowworms,
skyscrapers and four-wheel-drives with tinted windows
in the snow!
Mona Lisa is going crazy from being photographed with flashes
Rembrandt is indignant that the house he was evicted from
became a Rembrandt House Museum after his death . . .
Vincent . . . not to mention your Arles, Antwerp, wheat fields
the sea and its surges . . .
they overwhelm like fireworks
Maps maps maps
Wouldn’t you like to sleep in the snow of Vienna
skate down a river in Denmark
predicting the world is going to end?
Military motions rank in voltages as in a circuit/circus
Autistic children’s parents pay 75 dollars an hour
to get the kids trained like dogs to appear normal
robotic
with no feelings in particular areas
to ‘fit in’
and when they scream (the kids, not the parents)
they crowd in a flood
and can scream for the entire sixty minutes (of 75 bucks)
Hong Kong is burning
like London burned
like Paris burned
like all the previous revolutions that succeeded or failed
it would tap the surface that ripples while the big fish
stay cool in the dark currents under rocks and in the shadows
of the trees, untouched, keeping cool, feeling smug . . .
The people . . . like a rope, chain or windlass
slip into valleys and are never to resurface without fear&/
indignation . . .
The fountains dry from old age
Like rise and fall of oars above waves
We tip back with a jerk and feel awake
only to be dunked again into the cesspool of human wastes . . .
Something is partly alive
Erasing all our earliest senses
Replaces them with a great force finding no easy direction anywhere
Consequently causes us to burst . . .
We catch every blow
because it is not just the curse of our day
but a carelessness on the offensive without origin since the beginning of anything . . .
Devils look on with irritation
Their tails curled like chameleons’
They’re not smiling
Funeral rites are figurative, repetitive, boring
Music coming from a chimney
Bells deafening the dandelions
The people miserably booed
walk down streets after fires that burned for hours or days or weeks without real
imperatives
Someone was going back to the office
to rescue a stray cat that recently gave birth in a cardboard box
Police fired teargas and wished they could go home and sleep
The offices, the campuses, the subways, the trains
all gone.
The cats are not stupid.
They went into hiding long ago.
Hence when that someone went back to the office
risking his life in the fire, the cat
was nowhere
to be found.
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