“Does anyone still want to go with me into a panorama?”
Max Brod

The sun floats down river
resting from a long day.
as Barvard draws love

birds in the sand.
She tries to explain
how his deformity angers her.

Unable, she leaves him
on the other side of the shore.
Banvard becomes a traveling salesman,

a campfire fiddler,
a drunk, a painter of shores.
Yearning for her -

He turns her into the Mississippi shore.
Riding the long river, floating
on a brush, he paints her portrait.

Huge bolts of love
The canvas sags from longing
Immense wood contraption

(gears-pulleys crank machinery)
Three miles of canvas.
An uninterrupted portrait.

The papers publish the spectacle
“The hunch back painter and his panorama!”
He builds a wooden stage

Winds up river then down.
The lines are long, (.50 cents.)
they wait for hours….

He sits in the middle
of hungry brush stroke
Up river

down. Up river down
eyes straining
to find her.

To be published by JUKED.COM

The correspondence she writes is in the shape of a dog−
fills them with anecdotes of dressers

and the first two years of her life spent in a drawer.
We meet in Zurich over a nightmare –
(sleep under an argument)–

Travel to Berlin where a priest walks between us.
She promises to write.

Her letters are like a leap year. She writes riddles
about the price of post and serious Marian treaties –

only cursorily mentioning the living.
I read her letters like an eating

disorder. I try to decipher the hermetic meaning
of the word Shvod in all the margins.
Her last line reads,

“I must beat the walls it is March…”

A green streetcar is standing alone in the rain,
The man on the corner is staring at the green street-
Car . He is trying to remember

His daughters fifth birthday.

The green streetcar is alone in the rain.
The man is alone on the street in the rain.
He is staring at the streetcar, trying to remember

His daughter’s best friend’s name.

The man can hear the rain falling on
The empty green streetcar.

Rain is running down the back of his
neck and it is making him cold.

She is so much older now.

Her subtle lean left
accentuates the curve

of her waist - reminds
me of the curve of a street

in Rome where – I falll
in love with time

that moved so slowly –
The movement in the song

she plays for me turns
towards me, - The air

is a scented moment
of bed linens, lilacs,

leather, wood, ***,
soil - where memories

are instantaneous –
Everything is memory –

Everything has taken place – I am
in the middle of a Matinee

that I have never seen
before, but remember

so fondly. I am here now.
I easily could have been anywhere else.

The Lone Ranger writes a letter
to his Tanto, he writes,

things are not as they used to be.
I am as useless as an Iron Lung.

Riding around in his Ford Pinto
The Lone Ranger looks for anything
to do − the one working headlight
finding vultures on the side

of the road.
Driving through the night
scanning the radio for WXYZ

This long prairie night of his soul.
finding no one to save
he buys a *******
with a case of silver bullets.

She holds him like a little boy
Rocks him back and forth.

They don’t have ***.

He cries in her arms,

“I’m a man in a boy’s costume,”
“I am a jaw bone at a wedding.”

Later that evening
The Lone Ranger writes another letter

Dear Tanto,

Things are not as they used to be.
I am as useless as mouth without teeth.
I wish you were here.

Sincerely, Lone.

I did conspire to love you.

2. The moon was happy with us.

3. Baudrillard’s concept of “Object Fetishism” is more relevant than Marx’s.

4. Thank you.

5. Trees are closer to heaven than the angels. (I know, you already know that, but I like the line).

6. You have the most beautiful sorrowful eyes.

7. The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens. (RILKE 1912)

8. Locomotives fall in love going in opposite directions.

9. Certain earthquakes do not like themselves.

10. The more one contemplates the less one lives; the more one accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less one understands ones’ own existence and ones’ own desires. (Debord 1967)

11. I did plot to love you.

12. The black crow on the wire is not me.

13. Umbrellas can be opened inside. (Only black; counter intuitive, I know).

14. Your touch; my body remembers softly.

15. I did love you.

16. Clocks sometimes stop for no reason.

17. Even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that contains a desire or its reverse, a fear…Everything conceals something else.
(CALVINO 1972)

18 Sometimes letters sent, never arrive.

19. Only you ever made me blush.

20. In the end, everything is just a dream.

21. This poem will maximize your interval times.

22. Love is ambiguous, at best a “Contamination”, from the Latin *** tangere. “leaving a tactile print.”

23. I will let you go.

24. I will publish this poem

25. I will always love you.


Sincerely Mr. Leibow

My mouth is filled
with the taste of rust

and ***.
I sweat above her
& a drop falls

into the
shallow
of
her
neck.

The drop vibrating
like oi on the ground
from the passing
train – carrying

coal to keep
The cities burning.

In my chest,
the drone of a fly–

wheel
a counterwieght
a boiler
a bag of bees

She is below me
I feel her heart
it is an abrasion,
a bruise,
a beating fist
a bed of nails

This is how it is.

And here we are
lunging back
and forth like a Stoker
our breath chasing

after the last locomotive

plaintively
pulling away
                 from the station.