Richard Nixon, laughing-gas coloring his lips

blue with white blotches, is

exchanging, in this dream, worn socks

with me. He is also passing

stacks of gold coins to a mechanical panda

who tosses the coins into the skeletal lap

of an Empress Dowager. Nixon muttering

governing ain’t pretty.

 

Depression-era green glass

flying past this Quaker statesman

whose brothers are bleeding at the mouth

much like the Dowager who holds

the dripping hide of the panda

which she peeled off

with an element of grief

and a dull pear knife and her wooden teeth.

 

 

 

 

 

You kissed me sweetly on the bald spot

of my head—your lips

cold with tea

you had been drinking all morning.

You said your eyes hurt—that the tennis ball

was colored that weird green

so to be visible

above the clay court but not

in the long grass beyond the fence.

You said your eyes had shellac

on them. You have two

whiskers growing from your chin.

You remember still the photograph

of smiling African children

who did not ride the riverboat

that burned

terribly beyond the swamp in March.

You thought maybe two more weeks

of this and the long Labor Day

weekend and then you’d wish

we were all dead. Not the whole

fucking planet. Just our country

and two or three others thrown in…

 

 

 

 

 

The simple windshear off plutonium petticoats

and up in a rioting air, thirty-three thousand

greek centimeters from Earth—the bozo belle aircraft

docking for fuel at the sock-hop

for interdisciplinary storms

N by NW—or big sister innocently

feeds high octane fumes

to a sweet meat of hurricane pecans.

 

Servings for up to eight Eskimos,

mechanics in the Enigma Four vestibules, black tin

hangars where the graffiti reads:

you flyboys will be the death of us.

 

Cold War nostalgia and x-rays of the thorax.

Oppenheimer in the hall corridor coughing…

the astronaut’s gold-plated crucifix

in the adulterous bed of white knuckles—

 

marque nueve, allahu akbar, in mid-air

between tenements the chopper wash

off the long-faced bird’s-nest, machine-

guns splattering through the windowbox

of azaleas, at mid-air, sweeping

gunpowder, North/Northwest…. a locust-faced

helicopter…

 

not william burroughs fresh from posing

in the coffee shop, fresh

from the coast of Mexico

having gainfully shot

his dead wife in the adam’s-apple. A whole generation’s

meek

inheriting a brown heroin off the night street.

 

Even the eight foot tall sotted mouse

in flight from the gringos thinking

 

The flamingo knitting needle buried

in the eye of suspicious passivity. The ghosts?

The ghost queen of monaco saying