Complete Indigent Esplanade

I.

Trompe l’oeil is a fine sweep
Awoken now, for summer
In America without footnotes, if I dare
To edge you near the roof or the root of all
Words, like a trick of the tongue
We’re always saying, in the sweet unknowing.
Don’t listen to whisperers.
Write big slabs of poems
To the coming night. If you think it can,
Can it still be believed? I hope an iota
Sways in your swirl of words. Blake claims
“Europe, a Prophecy” was dictated to him
By a fairy. What did Jack Spicer make of
That? How can
Poets be so bound by time, who are
Archivists of the eternal?
The line is time-bound, or so I argued
Once. But now it seems to me
We spend our time & sell it
Accordingly. When there’s no more time left
Then will we be free? Is that what Kerouac meant
About his heaven? Me, I falter.
The poem is a record of its own making,
A heavenly wager— or nothing at all. Where was
I when I was (not) before? To tune the wheel
With no stars left. It cannot be for nothing in the
Care I veer,
In the dim treachery of Putin’s folly
“I want everything!”— a sidebar for pretenders
Who hear or bear important lore
In the care of once before.

II.

“Don’t worry. It means you’re a poet”
In the land of false prodigy, profligacy, or prophecy.
“Hey kid, got an end-word?” Suppose I die before my mind
Washes away its grain? Some loot, huh? By the way,
I see rabbits in the pre-dawn light
Who run like visitors
To the Old Town of our attendant follies
Either to estrange or go astray.
But since then, I have wondered what I’ve done;
Neither a Jack-in-Panic nor Jack Frost,
Mine is a symptom of malaise
I’m glad you asked for. Perhaps now
We could eke out a curvature
Of intended know-how.
Truth has us stunned, as do the winners
Who proceed, without palpable
Grace. Great minds break
The form of each other’s thought.
To breathe in skies not damaged (yet)
As if winds were (or are) false architecture
Until we cry, not knowing
What to say—