In The Factory With The Gears That Need Fixing

*
Stands in the muck, mangled,
amidst the architecture. Adamantine,
ruined.

Dismantling an imperfect language,
desiring the odor of crushed cruelty,
carefully, dearest tangle.... he considers:


Avocado,
Mouth,O
regano.

Distracted by the sound of something burning,
he misses red sweater, pearl, manhattan.

Further down, he gets to goats,
barley, bridge,
brutal morning tenderness,
petition, laughter,
and energy.

Untethered between paradise and wilderness,
he unseats the shining, deliberate tangles,
the falling smokestacks in the city of his grotesque birth,
the neighbor's plundered fields.

Rain thrashes,seems to carry
some uncommon nodbody
into the ditch. He doesn't remember
discarding his smoky clothes
in the vineyard fire.

Unwilling to sleep, he makes
an alter of the town ambulance.
Laughs as it burns and cackles in
Ed's Garage.

Driven simple by the stink apparatus,
he fancies himself a nailed figure pulled
by alligators through a book.



He says, "The radio's my vocation....."





*


fin.



*