Yes, we can, we can, we
try to find the sure foot
that slide-steps
the tragedy, the punch-love
function, a lesson say up
jump the boogie to the bang
bang boogie to the hip-hop,
the hibbie to the hibbie to the stop,
to the top-rock south of Vicksburg.
All right, ya'll, crank it up.
All ya'll wish I was frontin'
some slap-crappy happiness,
but I George Bush the Button.
I follow bad weather
straight to the spear-head
that the earth-born bear,
the sharp-thoughts eschewed
by the muddy daughters of dawn.
I smoke cell-phones & do-dads
& holler shoe-spits & moon-spats
at the shrug-narrow shoulders of new shirts.
Dust my mother's lawn.
Break my brother's brawn.
I sing like fifteen crows
drowning in a jacuzzi,
catch a cold & wrestle
the Holy Ghost, one wing woozy,
the other comatose.
Add some pump-punk, some jazz-junk.
Yes, yes, they learn as they observe & infer
what each thing is / tragedy will achieve /
tragedy will achieve what each thing is /
the speeches in which the speakers
decide or avoid the nothing &
the nothing at all.
She sang:
I don't do much.
I sleep thirteen hours & fuck
around the other twelve.
That cryptic code, that septic ode,
haunts the falling smoke-dust night.
We eat pommes frites
with vinegar & curry ketchup.
Hey, did you hump her, Harry?
Did you hump her?
My songs give you life & bring you
closer to death. There's nothing more
boring than a heroin addict,
except a tangle of addicts tooth-
grinding a ghostly road,
haunting the next-fix.
You done followed me too far.
I tell you I chill, if that you will
a while be still, & stop
wearing those fucking man-shoes
—
Do I look all right? I look
like a beatnik, honest?
Vicksburg, Mississippi, done left
it all up to you. Your heart's in your head.
What do you want to do, Baby?
I'll leave it all up to you, to you.
You do what you want to do.
Tonight the moon is pink & she
takes one more step
dancing toward the only minaret that's left.
The gardens of the Taj Mahal,
the four squares & the four squares
& the obsession with perfection & geometry.
You don't often see squares in nature, she said.
North, south, east, west,
like the streets of Roman cities & in Asia,
the north facing the south,
the ruler facing Tiananmen Square,
subdivided into nine further ones.
Ha!
she said.
The Eight Squares of Heaven
& the inside square, the building itself, in turn
has a proportion, a full
orchestration—maybe fifty-thousand singers—
a magic square, an infinite thought.
That's why,
she sang.
She sang,
That's why.
You decide.
You or we or I.
I or we or you?
Now, she said,
I have to go
outside the square,
a beautiful, a capsule or a cube,
an ideal containment of the classical box,
the Taj, a square within a square.
More than half of Vicksburg, Mississippi,
almost eighty-percent,
I said,
waits
for the two-thousand-thirteen
deadline.
We're through. We're through,
she said.
We threw you through.
