Cycling in the Street

This report describes the outline of a shadow
cast on a black background, a shadow shaped
like a tiger shark weaving through a sunken ship

whose barnacled hull is inscribed with bizarre carvings
like psychedelic tattoos--for example, a butterfly
with wings like rose windows of a cathedral.

The chimney soot of turpitude besmirches
the tabula rasa of the soul. Spreadeagled on
a wagon wheel rolling down an incline

toward an inexorable denouement, I cried,
"The noumenon has been relegated to Palookaville
effective immediately. Bankruptcy alternatives

are not an option. Inveighing against the night sky's
debris-strewn streets--legs of a cycle race
which occludes the blood vessels of a manikin--

will avail you nothing." You might see a shark around
Cathedral Rocks, its dorsal fin breaking the surface
of that silence which is more eloquent than all

the venerable tomes in a colonnaded library
rambling out of the wild west, leaving
the towns I love best: Tigerville (Tigerville),

Shadowburg and Sharkfinisterre now
(Shadowburg and Sharkfinisterre now),
yeah don't forget the Motor City

(can't forget the Motor City). My conversation
with the manikin flagged, but a revivifying subject
sashayed down the runway like a diva model

sumptuously bedizened with giallo film posters:
a future replete with cyclic revolutions
which will sweep the brain like so many gamma tsunamis.

The soul-searcher plies the murky streets of his inner
self; a radial spoke of a spiderweb
vibrates from a passing streetcar whose bell

can tell a thief from an honest man. Inglorious
things of thee are spoken, O cities of desolation
and degradation, of creepy-crawly crawmoms

and Wellington'd wombats, of shark-infested dives.
You'll never stool on Bonnie and Clyde, however;
you're afflicted with a parasitic infection

spread by pigeons. In describing such desperate cost-
cutting measures as sawing off branches of the public
library, this report on impoverished cities

demonstrates that morning will not come
overnight, that our shadowy background will stalk us
like a tiger all the way to the craggy promontory

beyond which lies nothing but a shark-infested
dive. So go ahead, fuck plenty with the future,
make it unknowable as a noumenon. I won't gainsay you.

But remember this: no matter how murky the ocean,
no matter how shabby the cathedral, no matter how
bloody the denouement, I shall, depend upon it,

requite thy pains in the hereafter. Thou shalt
revel in the splendor of celestial halls. Thou shalt
want for nothing but the nothing thou hast become.




photo: St. Christopher House, a former public library in Detroit. From The Ruins of Detroit by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre.