A silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.

Continental System

what does it want
it fancies

oh with a reader it might could read
a Landseer

it might go a touch or two
in a night need

if it could might recall the same
divorcement

 

quarantine corral

the wild buckaroos and vaqueros linger
tracing and being traced
it is a golden opportunity
to have been backtracked into a firewall
and the cold city berefted

 

purple sage

if I could've taken into buildings
a tour party and seen into them
what've I seen that could compare
with those labels and memorabilia
exactly of an occupation force

 

dry gulch

those conundrums dictate you from above
into puddles hot night
and local fauna

the flora can only be imagined
with second sight

 

a little town

out of the craters rises this
a congeries or nunnery
of hopeless delectation

out of this symbiosis
a wayward westness

Ansel Adams would have burned into this
a memory or dodged a certain blankness

 

main street

also it would have seemed a stage set lit
against the night with expressions of mythic milk
in a medium range of stars
but for the ruin

 

the astonied look

what is this cartoon range of events
as in a storyboard
it goes up and comes down in all but name

the kiddie rides are down the street
that was once

a farmer registers the playground
bullies and background

 

waystation

one false move
and an accidental virtuosity
is forced upon us

out of the blue sky hills and all that
comes a parvenu street that's opposite
it is remaindered

questa commedia il duce
with the broad-brimmed brows

and at the back or center
Pocahontas

 

amphitheater

how you arrive
dodging this and burned by that
or the other way around

pale ocher light
not without indications
and other signs

and here is the story
my story and yours

there once was a man

 

a tale that is told

parsimoniousness
wrecked the greed
you see

half-mast among the flags
of what remains

to Blarney Castle and environs

 

crepuscular

down away the sheltering palms
here's the ticket museum already

and you go on inside
there's the highway

away from whatever
that was

 

rondo

Luke the barn
they would say the impressionists

I met a fellow new at a gas station
in the South Bay
Arnold Schoenberg's spitting image

it's just a preserve
not very carefully preserved at all
that was a city

whether you think the barn was a new match
or quite impossibly slow
it went and goes they all go slow
and quick

 

turnstile

I don't know any about you
that clinches it
one way or another

here she is comin' round the mountain
or gazing up at it

 

disposited

if I could arrange all that
in flowers and rows
at a certain price

if I could imagine all that
I would if any do that
you know

but if I blistered it
for sure
I couldn't remember
that's that

 

the last outpost

oh detonate it those skyrockets
let the bland æsthete in his comfortable position
recoil to a safer stand

 

coming and going

impermeable Mary so be it
so the moves parley and move
parley and move or not
as the case may be
in the comfortable handgrip
of good counsel