Only a dish of blueberries could pull me
out of this lingering funk.
I’m tired of taking the kids down
to watch the riot, no longer impressed
with fancy electrical nets, sick
of supersonic nightsticks.

Buy myself a hot dog and a glass of beer–
that helps. It’s hard to say
who’s winning. Nobody is winning.

Boy, Kansas City! Big zoo! Oriental art!
Starlight Theater: Annie Get Your Gun
going into a seventeenth year.
Once I met Tab Hunter there, four o’clock
in the morning, standing in line

at the Coke machine, so tall and blond,
though not much of a conversationalist.

It’s good to be home, trying to soften
the blow for young girls who are inclined
to fall off their porches.

Some of my best friends are…
Curse on those who do or do not take dope.

When Autumn comes, O when Fall arrives,
in her chemise of zillion colors,
I will sigh noisily, as if an old and
disgusting leg had finally dropped off.

No more drinking beer, no more
the perpetual search for an air-
conditioned friend, no more friends.

I’ll take piano lessons, French lessons,
speed-reading lessons, and if there is
still time to kill, gawk at a bluejay
tumbling out of the maple tree.

Cars slide by with their windows up,
whispering of a Mexican Restaurant
“with really good Chilli Verde.”

The gutters billow with mauve death;
a mother’s sad voice sends out
a tugboat whistle through the purple mist:
she worries about her children.

And the dangerous fishhook of melancholy
dangles from every dog’s ear.
The dog that saved my life,
that keeps on saving it each long, humid night.
The dead dog. And so:

a shiny baseball hovers over the city.
No one asks why. And so: it passes on.
And so: a telephone starts to ring
in a widow’s cake-filled kitchen…

A rollerskate collides with a lunchpail.