Thoughts That Came To Me While Staggeringly Inert In Room 306 At The Ambassador Hotel

Yesterday I was like young.
It didn’t seem peculiar to anyone.
The ordinary is a blue cup leaking by a white plate.
It rains. I wander interstate
the inkless vein that fuels.
I think it would be nice to leave this room.

2

At night rain travels northward,
when I by darkness I do not own travel northward too.
Light ever magnifies
the list of days on which it snowed
and those on which it only rained.

3

Others huddle under covers in their beds,
because there is no hill to stand on.
Upturned palms staunch the rain
though seas flood toward the crowing cock:
a bastard I have known
who routinely killed the dreams I stroked
like the brutal farmer does his lovely horses in the field.

4

In darkness the eye is left to sense its limit.
Hands search walls to find a divot.
I pack my eyes
in chloroform beside my broken skis.
Laud bells announce the feast
to ring the skin off some immaculate beast.
It would have been nice to have wasted a life other than my own.

Barbarians

The clock I give you
with my blood inside. This clock

I leave at your door beneath
your pillow. In the forest
of hair in the castle of its
brush.

I guard that gate
they must always be absent from.

Or oar: from 'The Epics'

after Louis Zukofsky


OAR,
an equity --

and ore and orange
an inequity's also

Dear Critic,

I believe I could learn to love
this newest theory of yours --

if you could learn to tongue
these lines, your lips
smeared sloppily
with that gash-red lipstick I dream on --

a dirty open-mouthed kiss
that I would gently feed
myself into --

obdurating the irrelevant
meat of my art.

epigram

I always feel less anxious when I recognize that the collision is already well under way.

Joe Wenderoth, Letters To Wendy's (2000).