Go find a jukebox
And see what a quarter will do
I don’t wanna talk
I just wanna go back to the blue

Some of what we do, we do
to make things happen,
the alarm to wake us up, the coffee to perc,
the car to start.

When I was a boy and a man would die
we’d say a verse when the hearse went by
one car two car three car four
someone knocking on the devil’s door.

The robin is so quarrelsome. He barks to no one in the trees;
he fluffs his body twice its size and rattles in the leaves.
He doesn’t know or won’t accept the nest is empty now,
the eggs a tatter on the ground.

Because this evening Miss Hoang Yen
sat down with me in the small
tiled room of her family house
I am unable to sleep.

The naked sound of the body sounds
Like a trumpet. I announce a new world
In which your madness and my madness
At the point of a needle, is my love, spinning.

Beauty is an accusation. Nature
Herself has turned metaphysical.
Skull bears witness, proper
& perfect. Viper to socket, startles
me into alertness.

Sweet tones conjure
no song but
this
old vintaged
one –

Spooky summer on the horizon I’m gazing at
from my window into the streets
That’s where it’s going to be where everyone is
walking around, looking around out in the open
suspecting each other’s heart to open fire
all over the streets