Emotion and tone,
like sugar
in your tea.

Must go. Cannot explain.
The sadness is on the table.
I left you as much as half
of everything I own.
Maybe more.
Spend it how you like.
I know you will anyway.
This is no joke.
The marriage painting is fixed.
The key is under
your lover's pillow.
Tell the cat
Vive La France for me.

To go through a door -
which is all you can do -
with thought.

And yet - this is how
you think you were born -
if you are clumsy of thought -

only if -
you believe your mother
a simple door.

She is not.

The steam from a teakettle.
To be in love with one's own name!

Funny sort of locomotive!

Snow's field sweep,
painting
without a frame.

Atari clouds are digital ziggurats,
and rather minimal at that.
The sounds are Amiga.
Welcome to the eighties.

Your hair is big,
your clothes are odd,
and Nagel is a minor god.
Welcome to the eighties.

There is a plague
and ACT UP's rage,
but Reagan will not act his age.
For six years, he will say nothing.

Generation X gives birth to Y,
future hipsters to vilify.
All music is vinyl or cassette.
Rocks stars still wear epaulets.

There are two Coreys, podded peas.
Terrorists stay overseas.
Boy bands aren't quite yet in vogue.
Menudo carries a heavy load.

Ricky Martin is still straight.
Cimino ***** with Heaven's Gate.
Cindy Sherman is everyone.
Johnny Hinckley got his gun.

Welcome to the eighties.

You will probably always
be savage
as a drop of pond water.

The unnecessary magnification
of this wee orb
always reveals monsters -

animalcules -

relax.

The background
is ****-green.

All of life
flows from

our scumminess.

Old drain
talking like a frog
after the bath

All is full of love.
But, of brevity,
fuller.

The field of red flowers
on white stems.
Hurry home.

If the tiles of talking
are replaced by something else,
say, lexical snowflakes,

where will our linear minds be?
It's not that we don't understand
weird, multifoliate simultaneities

in dreams, in anguish,
or in ecstasy. It's just
the rest of the dumb time

we stand there and pull
from our mouths a usual
piece of numb string.

It has no glass.
Unlike you, I can feel
its actual hands.