rooftops atomic
cruel harvest / their white bloodless faces
& checked shirt black short decay in country
lanes / holding his head this morning the rain &
tu dam pagoda / twenty minutes in fishing
pants / tied behind his back / the marble turtle
italian in origin / the species of frontpage
immolation / fragments from the ditch / whole
world's duck fucking quaking that lingo / two
hours forty-eight year of the monkey / emerged
from a garage & past the milling crowds / on fire
years later / hue in december / three on a bike &
shirt / john butler / is soaked & the rats / ahead
pinstripe in transparent bags / black & white
river / this city / the wolf & debris reduced
to cheap music / like rocket to rome / some corpse
in a jacket / & drumsticks for intro / a memorable
trip where shoes dry & crack / after the rain /
the romance in tropics / is reading new york / in
this light she is browner / disguised as a swan /
she appears on the ramparts / winedark & rooftops
atomic / & moving like sex or a trojan / her fiction
like jack & his mardou / asleep in a pan / like an egg
which is cracked / every morning the wound / growing
thin as an answer / to malice or time / like a skyline
in ashes when irish cops cry out / like morrissey / blind
or just blinking in code / & her hands as the river / the
sardines on sticks / making love like a back-pocket / gulag in blue
turtle place
old quarter walking the thirty-six
streets & the bikes with their horns
are imagined like visions of bead
curtain jesus & cut into strips mona
lisa she flaps with no head in a plain
metal bucket the gutter is shallow &
skied like vermilion outsider songs
with their stomping detectives &
murder-art role-plays even now eno
seeks treatment block-printing forks
& the shadow of men being warehoused
in lunchrooms & joking like back
row in school now & howdy pete's
taken the august poem watching the
blacksmith we head for the china street
bowl street but no longer there they exist
where the turtle is cosmic & spends his days
gifting swords while the bird on his back
looks indifferent to long life & mandarin names
or the wobbling girls' bike & i'm riding & scared
more than winter or tunnels in saigon the alleys