Measuring out the Jack
Daniels at 1 : 25,
closing the cupboard

Long past that moment,
                I might guess when it was,
                but strangely I have no

she’d rather hobble to the window
           to look out on garages and planets

That woman on the beach camouflaged
in sand (in California where
they have Satanic rituals now)

It was a pretty boat, tied to the pier,
greeting a city with streets of water,
the great gold griffin of its tall smokestack

On the farm this had been the hour
Persimmon leaves rang like iron
Or the sound of a screendoor slamming

I am dying now from a bite on my neck
that doesn’t stop bleeding. I’m trying
to carry on a normal existence, not

Winsome Bob meets Katherine & drops Nancy.
Nancy burrows even deeper
into her studies of semiology, at Yale.

In the ninth grade I met a fantastic number of times
with Cookie Harris in the woods . . . Under the pretense
of going over our Algebra notes, given the pressure

Eddie, you said you forgot about insanity & death
when you were at the beach. ‘From Beer To Eternity’
was as serious as you could take it.