“In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.”
                       Delmore Schwartz
 

In dreams begin irresponsibilities

Elliptical plummets on wind’s back

Reels and rolls


Lost footage

Folded and torn snapshots

Exits bolted


Heat molded telephone

Rotting inside story

What will it be

Old flames


Burning postcards


Crooked black cradles


Donut’s toxic modules


Sweet parade dust


Sputtering in cooperation room

Down from where


You are a scientist


Or a druggist


Billiard idiot


Or pool shark


A head wound


With blue ascot

In cordovan and corduroy

Crunch of caravan


Pressing nose

Against earth

Cupid’s broken left arm


Slings more arrows


Than you can spit on


Grant this poet


This wheezing pariah

This purveyor of riddled language

This impecunious slug


This soiled stew pit


This chop suey commercial


Tattooed status of blue stethoscope sky

Poisonous petals growing in vats

Dotted ursine lump


Borrowed archer


Blessed be these


Bits of glassy grime


Morning coolness


Twirling butterflies

Biographical vapors


Skywriting under the trees


Special attention


Must be paid


To journeying


Along narrow paths


Between Santa and Satan


Samarkand and Sausalito


Between monastically cropped lawns

Raising their spikes in triumph

Snapped open and released

Almanacs cataloguing


Temptations salvations redemptions

Averted and advertised


Icy blue sonnets


Corseted couplets


Meticulously cut cubes of cheese

Poetry of obligatory peephole

Poetry of commonplace


Sorrow made special


Attention calling

Intricacies of divorce


Desertion disaster


Island of scholarly flocks

Pork barrel and beans


The carcass is a remnant


What fled the scene


Dragging its tongue


Across earth to no avail


Windows nailed


Shut in yellow clay


Doors burned


To their shadows


Copious ashes


Boomeranging


Across barn


Slain brethren

Amending backyard

Barbecue pits

Determined inhabitants

Hatched in spectrum

Calculated range of

Normalized behavior

Substitute underworld arcade

Incarcerated conversation

Daughter of a cancer

Son of an egregious terror


There are many ways


To repeat yourself


This is not one of them

This is fragrance skipping amok

Amidst sacred hydrocarbons

Scintillation of metallic water

Graffiti: Poets are germ engravers

Disguised as grave diggers

Graffiti: Dawn is a seagull

Stuck on far end of plastic fork


Graffiti: Plenum of glabrous vampires


Await further distribution


Gleaming pink arrangement and camera shy

Using only long ropes and sharpened pegs

Ban the use of euphemisms


This poem will not extol


Virtues of one-room schoolhouse


Bootstrap dragging


Pulley mechanism


Grand pasha of motivating metaphors

Heated by potbellied


Police officer

Spoonfuls of coal dangled


Into mouth of glowing ghosts


Flocking at door of meaning


Trumpet clock’s composition of anxiety

Notoriously unwilling to offer


Proper burial services


Plagiarism plagued provinces

Egyptian garage complete


With gas-operated chariot


Whalebone bathtub

And muslin shawl

Do not slobber on yourself

In an attempt to be


Distracting and beautiful


Do not paraphrase


Your green fatty regions


They are lectures


On inevitability of collapse


Do not pretend


To fabricate frivolity


Just another post in worm fence

Do not dance around bride


Toiling at her daily bread

Claiming I was not myself that day


—Or anyone else for that matter—

Time travel is a popular


Vacation resort


Vacated escort


Where thinking

Becomes a form of relief


A polka dot rain cloud

Attempting to communicate

With pink mesa

Ladled blue

Pheremones


Pilgrims dutifully trudge across

Six-lane highway of higher education

Enter great rotunda


Each sucking a lozenge

Blessed impediment


Granted imperceptible privileges

Summer accentuates colors

Found in parking lots

Drive-through commuter carpet

Majestic mauve


Not among them


The air you breathe


Becomes iron


Free collar


Grammatical reaction


To inherited condition

Corruption engines


Steaming stacks of paper

Waiting to greet you


Beat you at end of long journey


Poem trafficking in words


Circling mountains of shoes and shirts

Dentures from another time and place

Charnel house archive

Weather conjuring

Spiral dregs


Character development

No longer

Part of the syllabus


Consigned to


Bevy of blonde-colored bleachers

Flooded with glissando pigments

This is not the right


Time to imitate nausea


Unhitch your wagon

From horses of irritability

Gallant knights


Melt in merciless sun


Daylight’s rubber eraser


Sticking more


Pink dust to your lips