We were figures in a tableau of postwar America.
In the deathcab wafting us Walhalla-ward
Elektra lost her cocoa-encrusted cool.

I know a place where the music is fine
and the lights always low, so you can’t see
the mayhem. There slinkies
sorely lacking in sangfroid
emit magenta screams and noisome
opalescences.

Whaddaya want, anyway? Dragons to cluster all over
the femme fatale? Stained glass ponies
entranced by pansexual ruins?

Mugwumps in flagrante?

Old Harryknuckles there holds his tongue
to be self-evident, that loneliness is an
epiphenomenon of wealth in a
shoebox made of whale milk.

But a breakfast of luminous prairie chickens
is no consolation for a swash of alleycat
windmills, or even a stogie
sketching skull brogans.

A paltry wage hike
in the mountainlike patterns
inscribed on my eyelids.

Sous-chefs loom like government-subsidized
icebergs between the cobbles on the path to
the annual fundrazor.

I lick the scar
on a little wonder car
passing a room
crowded with dead children.

A beehive of sleek
dwarves having sex in deep
thought.

An upside down cake frosted with
post-it notes.

Freeway ends 1 mile.






album cover for Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures