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Let us honor the topmost banner fluttering over the kingdom of commodities— the encoded soul of price rose of the name and name of the rose, bundle of stems, fasces of tendons and veins— wrist on which to auscultate the pulse of money.

Things happen when you drink too much mescal. One night, with not enough food in my belly, he kept on buying.   I’m a girl who’ll fall damn near in love with gratitude and, well, he was hot and generous and so the least that I could do was let him kiss me, hard and soft and any way you want it, beast and beauty, lime and salt—sweet Bacchus’ pards— and when his friend showed up I felt so warm and generous I let him kiss me too. His buddy asked me if it was the worm inside that makes me do the things I do. I wasn’t sure which worm he meant, the one I ate?   The one that eats at me alone?

A perfect veronica, invisible, scallops air before the bull, the bartender’s fluttering hands. Tipped with silken fruit tinseled gold, a dusty banderilla hangs above racked bottles, burnt-orange. Your lacquered fingers streak the cocktail napkin and the globe of cognac’s fragrant on the zinc bar. Fields of chamomile. Close your eyes and then the night turns to coal seamed with diamonds. Outside, a girl murmurs her tired price, in pesetas, to passing men. Irita, the barman calls when she wanders in to wash at the single coldwater tap. Just a fly-blown café on your functionary’s street of flats, bedrooms shuttered around their whispering, the shops that gleam by day with scaled cellophane piglets, mounded bins of fruit and olives. Irita rewinds her hair at the bar, a gilt rosette nestling its waves, tattered bullfight posters on the wall behind her and you think of Rita Hayworth tossing roses in Blood and Sand, the frayed banderilla. Such a lovely thing to torture an animal with, the corrida’s exacting choreography of life and death. Sometimes it’s soothing to evaporate in this smoke-patinaed air, abandoning your imposter’s life of embassy files breathing the military names and numbers, Torrejón’s precise cold barracks. Your face wavers, oddly calm in the mirror as the girl talks dancing and flamenco clubs to the barman, absinthe glass shining derangement in his hand. It’s the place in the night where you carve an uneasy confederacy from vapor and exhaustion, a trio—the alien, the clownish poseur, the girl with nothing to sell but herself and straitened, cataleptic dreams. She stretches, plays idly the slot machines spinning roses, babies and lemons, the brilliant suit of lights. The caramel glow of the barlamps haloes her hair, bitten lips. Another sip and the slots’ click is rosary beads wafting prayers up to a heaven of slink and spangle, quick bargains struck in alcoves, that old palm of chapped fingers slipping coins to the gas meter, of spreading stain across the counterpane. Around Bar Xanadu narrow streets fill with the violet steam of after-midnight, the pigeons’ soft venereal cooing that speak of want like this, that deep original loneliness. There are heartless places in every city you’ve lived. Cognac spreads its window of warmth and the drifting years return bordered with the crimes of night, with cramped rooms you’ve climbed to, dead as the money in your pockets. A “dimestore Mata Hari,” the bureau chief called you while he snipped a fresh cigar. On parched plains outside the city soldier boys drill before the fighter planes, glamorous with starlight, still floating half-asleep in some Iowa of vinyl booths and Formica, miles of hissing corn. But it’s closing hour and beneath your fingers the napkin snows its raddled lace across the bar and you must rise with them, rise to dust with the barman his green bottle, help him to don the sparkling jacket. Rise to strap the magic shoes to Irita’s feet and then you must walk with her these streets you’ll never leave, gritty with wind from Andalusia riffling your skirt in the scent of blood oranges and sweat.

In Scarlet town, where I was born, There was a fair maid dwellin’, Made every youth cry Well-a-way! Her name was Barbara Allen. All in the merry month of May, When green buds they were swellin’, Young Jemmy Grove on his death-bed lay, For love of Barbara Allen. He sent his man in to her then, To the town where she was dwellin’; “O haste and come to my master dear, If your name be Barbara Allen.” So slowly, slowly rase she up, And slowly she came nigh him, And when she drew the curtain by— “Young man, I think you’re dyin’.” “O it’s I am sick and very very sick, And it’s all for Barbara Allen.”— O the better for me ye’se never be, Tho’ your heart’s blood were a-spillin’! “O dinna ye mind, young man,” says she, “When the red wine ye were fillin’, That ye made the healths go round and round, And slighted Barbara Allen?” He turned his face unto the wall, And death was with him dealin’: “Adieu, adieu, my dear friends all, And be kind to Barbara Allen!” As she was walking o’er the fields, She heard the dead-bell knellin’; And every jow the dead-bell gave Cried “Woe to Barbara Allen.” “O mother, mother, make my bed, O make it saft and narrow: My love has died for me today, I’ll die for him tomorrow.” “Farewell,” she said, “ye virgins all, And shun the fault I fell in: Henceforth take warning by the fall Of cruel Barbara Allen.”

Up from the meadows rich with corn, Clear in the cool September morn, The clustered spires of Frederick stand Green-walled by the hills of Maryland. Round about them orchards sweep, Apple- and peach-tree fruited deep, Fair as a garden of the Lord To the eyes of the famished rebel horde, On that pleasant morn of the early fall When Lee marched over the mountain wall,— Over the mountains winding down, Horse and foot, into Frederick town. Forty flags with their silver stars, Forty flags with their crimson bars, Flapped in the morning wind: the sun Of noon looked down, and saw not one. Up rose old Barbara Frietchie then, Bowed with her fourscore years and ten; Bravest of all in Frederick town, She took up the flag the men hauled down; In her attic window the staff she set, To show that one heart was loyal yet. Up the street came the rebel tread, Stonewall Jackson riding ahead. Under his slouched hat left and right He glanced: the old flag met his sight. “Halt!”— the dust-brown ranks stood fast. “Fire!”— out blazed the rifle-blast. It shivered the window, pane and sash; It rent the banner with seam and gash. Quick, as it fell, from the broken staff Dame Barbara snatched the silken scarf; She leaned far out on the window-sill, And shook it forth with a royal will. “Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, But spare your country’s flag,” she said. A shade of sadness, a blush of shame, Over the face of the leader came; The nobler nature within him stirred To life at that woman’s deed and word: “Who touches a hair of yon gray head Dies like a dog! March on!” he said. All day long through Frederick street Sounded the tread of marching feet: All day long that free flag tost Over the heads of the rebel host. Ever its torn folds rose and fell On the loyal winds that loved it well; And through the hill-gaps sunset light Shone over it with a warm good-night. Barbara Frietchie’s work is o’er, And the Rebel rides on his raids no more. Honor to her! and let a tear Fall, for her sake, on Stonewall’s bier. Over Barbara Frietchie’s grave Flag of Freedom and Union, wave! Peace and order and beauty draw Round thy symbol of light and law; And ever the stars above look down On thy stars below in Frederick town!

“This is my last communiqué from the planet of the monsters.” Roberto Bolaño , Distant Star When I watched the Barbaric Writers defecate on my manuscript, I felt a great sense of relief, a great sense of fraternity with these men who loved literature enough to destroy it, and I recalled a poem I had once written, but never had the confidence to publish, about a so-called poet who shat himself into a toilet, only to float on his back as torrential downpours of power filled the bowl and drowned him. I have always know that constipation is essential to poetry, though what I did not realize, until recently, was that poetry itself is repulsive. Words on their own are bad enough. But when placed alongside other words, when formed into rhythmic lines and stanzas: no act of creation is more hideous. In the salons, I have often watched, before my turn came on, our local poets reciting their verses. They speak politely, and with grace, to an audience that sips wine and chuckles at the words that flow not from their mouths, but from their plugged-up behinds. What a holy mockery of literature! Were the barbarians to see such a spectacle, no theater walls could stand the shock of their laughter. No, poetry is not what I want. Only defecation on poetry. For after years of humiliation, I have finally learned that to humanize our poems, we must shit on them. We must shit freely, with arms raised, as detectives in blue sport coats examine our feces for sustainability, all the while fighting off other detectives in bluer sport coats who take our poetic leakage to their laboratories to search for parasitic demons, or diamonds, depending on the angle. We smear what drips from our self-inflicted wounds onto our verses, combining blood and ink into new poetic forms in which we rub our faces, the better to smell our disgusting children with, the better to drool on our disgusting children with; and once we have bled and drooled and driveled, we declare our poems complete, the better to wipe our asses with, before submitting them for publication. We smear our typewriters with pus and semen, and chastise any fool crass enough to declare himself a poet, an offense punishable by confinement in a cage surrounded by Barbaric Writers who expectorate between the distinguished author’s eyes, his hands tied behind his back to prevent him from cleaning his face. For poetry is hard work! It is hard to create such filthy, vile putrescence.

Learn from the man who spends much of his life speaking To the back of your head knowing what it means to follow The razor’s edge along a worn strop or random thoughts As they spring so invisibly from the mind to a mouth Who shouldered soldiers in two wars and fled fire fields Undecorated who fathered once but was fatherless forever And who works his sentiments in deeper into your scalp Under a sign on the knotty-pine walls whose rubric reads quot homines, tot sententiae which means he sees In you his suffering smells of horehound tonics and gels Pillow heads and powders and a floor full of snippings Swept neatly every evening into a pile for the field mice All those roundabout hours only a man who fixes his tie To clip crabgrass crowding a lady’s grave could believe With a certain clean devotion and who would never for one Moment dream of hurting you when your back was turned

For John Ashbery “Good Barber of the Pea!” I exhumed, high into the vag where the barber keeps his pea — “Good Sprout!” His mouth, his gray, hunted tongue, always in the distance — “No use denying we master the particular service we deny ourselves. In the shade of this pea (the sum of his shade and the gavel flexing above his head) I will become a milliner to cover what work I’ve done. Or else, I’ll begin anew at the infant chin, where nothing grows but chins! Outside, snails, vines, surpass me and must — gaining pews upon pews. But don’t think for a sec I don’t know the way out of here, that release is one hair — spiral stair — top of which cleavage evaporates”

for John Ashbery “Good Barber of the Pea!” I exhumed, high into the vag where the barber keeps his pea— “Good Sprout!” His mouth, his gray and hunted tongue always in the distance— "No use denying we master the particular service we deny ourselves. In the shade of this pea (the sum of his shade and the gavel flexing above his head) I will become a milliner to cover what work I’ve done. Or else, I’ll begin anew at the infant chin, where nothing grows but chins! Outside, snails, vines, surpass me and must—gaining pews upon pews. But don’t think for a sec I don’t know the way out of here, that release is one hair—spiral stair—top of which cleavage evaporates”

Inside the standard lunch hour din they rise, four seamless voices fused into one, floating somewhere between a low hum and a vibration, like the sound of a train rumbling beneath noisy traffic. The men are hunched around a booth table, a fire circle of coffee cups and loose fists, leaning in around the thing they are summoning forth from inside this suddenly beating four-chambered heart.   I’ve taken Avery out on a whim, ordered quesadillas and onion rings, a kiddy milk with three straws. We’re already deep in the meal, extra napkins and wipes for the grease coating our faces and hands like mid-summer sweat.   And because we’re happy, lost in the small pleasures of father and son, at first their voices seem to come from inside us.Who’s that boy singing? Avery asks, unable to see these men wrapped in their act.   I let him keep looking, rapt.   And when no one is paying attention, I put down my fork and take my boy’s hand, and together we dive into the song.   Or maybe it pours into us, and we’re the ones brimming with it.