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Matches among other things that were not allowed never would be lying high in a cool blue box that opened in other hands and there they all were bodies clean and smooth blue heads white crowns white sandpaper on the sides of the box scoring fire after fire gone before I could hear the scratch and flare when they were over and catch the smell of the striking I knew what the match would feel like lighting when I was very young a fire engine came and parked in the shadow of the big poplar tree on Fourth Street one night keeping its engine running pumping oxygen to the old woman in the basement when she died the red lights went on burning

Out of a fired ship, which by no way But drowning could be rescued from the flame, Some men leap'd forth, and ever as they came Near the foes' ships, did by their shot decay; So all were lost, which in the ship were found, They in the sea being burnt, they in the burnt ship drown'd.

fleshes  his dirty  rotten  hunka  tin   I  am  right   strapped  into  head  electrodes   he sticks a gun in teen age drug   Harry S Truman decided to drop first   I am right   sequence   repeat   dim  jerky  far  away smoke   cop rat bares his yellow teet   kicks in the door   I am right   survivors burned   time and place   he throws atom bomb   knocks man to floor   you are wrong you are wrong   he was looking for are wrong   Breaks through door I’m poli   outside bar   Hiroshima   has strayed into Dillinger’s right   is making a difficult decision   right   survivors burned   mixed you child I am he kicks him into 1914 movie   if you are gay I am right   wrong   executioner   officer   I am cop   right enough you are I am right   right   wrong Pentagon   dim jerky far away smoke. I cut up his cut-ups, allegory of an allegory of an allegory of an allegory of a waterfall of mental curlicues whose new meaning is no meaning in extremity. Is a Burroughs to eat? I am timid, abstract, complete, light fever, timid. Barefoot, yells Hey Pop, got any more Dick Tracys?  Burroughs am paying one wrecked penny for the pleasure he’s wreaking on some “boy”; shooting quarts of toxins,  skin a welcome  mat,  body  heroically disjunct Picasso  (two profiles,  left  front  high…).  The stapled urge for self-protection that…Danger is a refuge from more danger. Don’t even know what a Burroughs is. Manhattan Project, first atom bomb test, New Mexico 1945: Oppenheimer and his boys think the planet could go critical. Oppenheimer refigures, the probability remains, “What the  hell.” So-and-so many blasts: radioactive sex causes untold genetic mutations. A carnival of giants, vile luminosity sheeting off their scales and exoskeletons, march out of that desert looking for something to eat. I don’t want to die but witness APPETITE and MURDER tread the vile luminous sand: ant spider Gila monster rattler wasp rat locust lizard grasshopper rabbit praying mantis crow ant spider wasp…The entire town of Soda Bluff stampedes down narrow canyons scattering funeral lights beneath their trembling feet. The destruction of today. Last men, mercenaries on the last patrol, eat rations with dog mouths, then fool around in caustic green dusk; they wear Mylar capes and copper-studded jockstraps. Bud’s withheld a basket musta weigh two pounds of fresh peaches. Bud squirms down with a deep sigh, odor of penetration, he says, “I want to be so embraced.” The last ant cold mandibles his thigh, a howl and spasms from Bud’s lifted body mean death. I send my own spear into the enormous insect eye shattering a thousand selves —point touched pinpoint brain, blue sparks, burning isolation, burning rubber, ant collapses, cold heap of old parts. The reason Bud dies, so that his orgasm stays beyond. I don’t wonder who I am, I wonder where I am—still, nothing to do now but kick back and wait for orders.

for Seamus Heaney Overture: violins: it is all scraggy, wideawake, ironical, decked out in denim fatigues. Witty and welcoming, leathery-evergreen, bemedalled with beercans, cowpat and wallaby-dung, flap, nub, hinge, node, blindeye quartzite, wafery sandstone, bright as a button subtle for mile on mile far from vulgarity (far from sleek Europe) in its array of furniture tonings sheeted by sunglaze lovingly dusted, wispy and splintery, tussocky, corduroy, all of its idiom dry as a thesis to moist outsiders: wonderfully eloquent on its home ground, branchful of adverbs, lovingly wombat-hued, dreamily sheeptoned, fluted with scalloping surf and every step a joke.

Stiff, thick: the white hair of the broad-faced father, who leads his shambling son along cracked sidewalks, by dusty glass half hiding goods never sold. The son is the taller one but still a child: not aware of his clothes, of what expressions seize on his soft face. His gait lolls, loosely directed from some weak, distant center, scarcely devoted to any purpose but following along and looking. Thick lenses glint with watery blue: his small eyes, veiled and placid, as far off as the milky August sky. The father, all the time glancing at him and talking as man to man, seems to forget it would be better for this one to have been like all the rest. He has his son still with him, the others have grown up and gone away—but when he dies, then what will happen to the boy? Even this thought is absorbed now in their ordinary errand, men’s business: grateful going out through the day, talk with the owners, the salesmen, a mechanic in the scent of grease and sawdust of machined metal, the sifting through tools and parts that flow, spill, gleam like seeds, like sand—looking for what fits, finding what will work. Afterwards to stop for food, then walk back home down the clear streets, when starlings, hunting and restless before sleep, and children are the loudest things, with the dark foaming among maples, glinting, as it comes in.

The Bustle in a House The Morning after Death Is solemnest of industries Enacted opon Earth – The Sweeping up the Heart And putting Love away We shall not want to use again Until Eternity –

This is a day when I covered no ground. Just pushed and shuffled my papers around, Nudged at letters and winced at bills, Sorting them out into different hills, Hunted fretfully for a ruler, Worried the overworked water cooler, Sharpened pencils and filled my pen, Then shuffled my papers around again.

But isn’t midnight intermittent Or was that just a whispered nine A snap of blown light low against the flank of a cow A likeness of something numberless that only I not knowing the sound might know It may have been howled by a circling dog being chastised — threatened — by multiples of itself in pursuit of the consolation of knowing that everything is real It was real I don’t mean midnight — despite horizon, nipple, and fissure I don’t mean And yet I do — mean, I mean A cowering animal woven real flickers please pull over Kierkegaard Kierkegaard says knowledge precedes every act but surely there are acts that are not preceded by knowledge. Repetitions pass at the door from summer to winter. Some slowly. Some quickly. Total strangers. Never saw them before. Can’t picture them now. Umbrellas — strange totalities — upheld, wheeling.

But it says nothing. And one is as quiet as if to say nothing moves me. Then there is the chair. And one speaks of the chair sitting at the table. Scraping against surfaces, opening the mouth. The object is a piece of thing before. One shifts in a chair and opens the talk. And the time it says nothing one moves. The table is too long as the wall. Not a thing but it stays and one opens as a mouth will begin. Speaking of the table, nothing but to avoid that of the wall. One could return over and over to the chair, the wall one is sitting at. Least ways it says nothing. And the thing is, it stays still before speaking of. The object of nothing, even speech.

The world’s light shines, shine as it will, The world will love its darkness still. I doubt though when the world’s in hell, It will not love its darkness half so well.