On Peripheries of the Imperium

i Eye of the hurricane the Battery, the Hudson breached, millions of gallons of it north on West Street filling Brooklyn–Battery Tunnel, overflowing into the World Trade Center site, East River, six-to-eight-foot wall of water on South, Front, Water, John, Fulton, Pearl, Brooklyn Bridge’s woven cables lifted delicately in hurricane sky. ii Perhaps I make too much of it, that time, Eldon Axle, brake plates dipped in some sort of liquid to protect them from dust, dirt, metal chips the grinding caused — that time, night shift, press-machine shop on Outer Drive, rolls of stainless steel put in, fixed up, because the work you do is around fire your cuticles burn if the mask’s not on right. iii When the mind is clear, to hear the sound of a voice, of voices, shifts in the attitude of syllables pronounced. When the mind is clear, to see a Sunday, in August, Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation, Carey, Ohio, at a holy water font, a mother washes her six-year-old’s fingers crushed in an accident so that they’ll heal. iv So what percentage of Weasel Boy’s DNA do you think is pure weasel? Tooth-twisted, Yeats’s weasels, in “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” fighting in a hole. v Conflated, the finance vectors, opaque cyber-surveillance, supranational cartels, in the corporate state’s political-economic singularity the greatest number of children in United States history are, now, incarcerated, having been sentenced by law. vi A comic dimension to it, on this F train to One Hundred Sixty-Ninth Street in Queens? He doesn’t want to disturb you, but, see, he was stabbed in the face with an ice pick, he lost his left eye — lid pried open with thumb and forefinger — here, look, he’ll show you — a white-and-pink-colored iris.