Andrei Codrescu

The conversations of the French Quarter mules in their stables after a full day of pulling tourists and voters over cobble- stones is not espresso witty and in their dark no TVs feed them news of the ends of mules elsewhere in the Middle East and West. In our stables the ends of others are a fact of atmosphere. The yoyos on the mystery island nextdoor are revving familiar tools in backyard now gripped by failure first of electricity than of a meaner something that’ll grow into nothing we’ll know in the A.M. Once they were visitors like us then they grew mulish in their bubbles and pulled whatever was put around their necks in- cluding a banner that said, About What Kills Us We Know Little. On certain nights after a good internal fight we hear the voice- less others through the glass fearfully sweet’n’soft like dough. Oh let the monsters in. Help us rise above our not seeing them, may they let us into their eyes as well. Banish the blindness of these cobblestones, clop, clop. But! Pffsst! Our notes are in- complete. Loving you was never on the agenda. Better to sing as roughly as the stones. On Memorial Day we had one thousand hotdogs & counting. Didn’t visit a single graveyard. We the Grant Wood folks scan the sky for incoming missiles: blips ourselves we understand timing and touring in America. The gilded dads in the portraits sought the idealized continuity now moving before us democratically in showers of pixels and dots. I’ll go with the distracted mariner, my lover, and we’ll be in the world. It will be late by then and dark. We lyric virgin mules keep our book of hours in a dream apart, having stranded a billion turistas. But we could not break the chummy hand. Ready to brave the snow without a hat, severe weather notwithstanding, we merely nod and understand.

silver & gossamer & porcelain & cobwebs some people are made out of they walk from here to there a limited number of times only— but the bony phone is just dumb plastic it rings not at all i don’t understand: my ideas are universal but my audience is five guys at the shell station people just don’t get it she longs for what makes her grin (tînjeşte dupâ ce rînjeşte) the sweetness of want the repulsiveness of having after days she was returned by the storms of language that had tossed her far & she rearranged her face for the english language— what i heard i did not hear what i saw i did not see i trust my sense to dullness then i kill my joy & cease to be

is all wrong, ed what poets now live where they say they do where they started out where they want to half the midwesterners did time in new york the other half in california only new yorkers write as if they are from new york and mostly they are not the ones in california were wounded elsewhere when they feel better or can't afford the rent they'll go back where they came from this is america you get hurt where you are born you make poetry out of it as far from home as you can get you die somewhere in between the only geography of poets is greyhound general motors rules them all ubi patria ibi bene or ibi bene ubi patria bread out of nostalgia not a lot of it either some of us came from very far maps don't help much