Rhapsody

515 Madison Avenue door to heaven? portal stopped realities and eternal licentiousness or at least the jungle of impossible eagerness your marble is bronze and your lianas elevator cables swinging from the myth of ascending I would join or declining the challenge of racial attractions they zing on (into the lynch, dear friends) while everywhere love is breathing draftily like a doorway linking 53rd with 54th the east-bound with the west-bound traffic by 8,000,000s o midtown tunnels and the tunnels, too, of Holland where is the summit where all aims are clear the pin-point light upon a fear of lust as agony’s needlework grows up around the unicorn and fences him for milk- and yoghurt-work when I see Gianni I know he’s thinking of John Ericson playing the Rachmaninoff 2nd or Elizabeth Taylor taking sleeping-pills and Jane thinks of Manderley and Irkutsk while I cough lightly in the smog of desire and my eyes water achingly imitating the true blue a sight of Manahatta in the towering needle multi-faceted insight of the fly in the stringless labyrinth Canada plans a higher place than the Empire State Building I am getting into a cab at 9th Street and 1st Avenue and the Negro driver tells me about a $120 apartment “where you can’t walk across the floor after 10 at night not even to pee, cause it keeps them awake downstairs” no, I don’t like that “well, I didn’t take it” perfect in the hot humid morning on my way to work a little supper-club conversation for the mill of the gods you were there always and you know all about these things as indifferent as an encyclopedia with your calm brown eyes it isn’t enough to smile when you run the gauntlet you’ve got to spit like Niagara Falls on everybody or Victoria Falls or at least the beautiful urban fountains of Madrid as the Niger joins the Gulf of Guinea near the Menemsha Bar that is what you learn in the early morning passing Madison Avenue where you’ve never spent any time and stores eat up light I have always wanted to be near it though the day is long (and I don’t mean Madison Avenue) lying in a hammock on St. Mark’s Place sorting my poems in the rancid nourishment of this mountainous island they are coming and we holy ones must go is Tibet historically a part of China? as I historically belong to the enormous bliss of American death