where I spend my days
and nights caught in
the habits of ghosts
the yellow room
with the rollaway bed
and the card table
of paperbacks, a
transistor radio and
a copy of Good News
for Modern Man
no different now
except the window's
larger and the plaster
swirls are grey like
suicide winter
the year spent tapping
keys and washing dishes
reading Giants in the Earth
and Liturgies of the Western Church,
and Liturgies of the Western Church,
taking photographs of
Asylum Lake, the long
walk behind the paper mills,
snowflakes smelling like
the dead river
look, brother, we're not
the revolutionaries we
hoped, it's all disco and
glitter glam and Jesus
catching the the Greyhound
to Ann Arbor, dipping
sardines in ketchup
and passing Old Crow
the proselyte pan handling
in Candy Cane Lane eating
dogpiss snow to heal his
broken teeth, the city's Dutch
Reformed swilling fondue,
Swedish meatballs, and
marshmallow jello
Sunday morning in this
room, behind distorted
glass, like ice fishing
with mealy worms,
a plate of cold toast and
margarine, Taster's Choice
crystals, the dream again
of reading in the dark,
reading in the dark!
eyes penetrating the
unfathomable pages,
ancestral ghosts
loosened from the black
cages
this room I'm in now,
this one you can't see,
the one that I too cannot
see -- once again it is
torpid, unconscious
the death of the world
and you-know-who all
over again, it gets so
cramped -- I don't
want to waken in
the closet blind and
scratching the yellow
plaster, mouth groping
like a bluegill plopped
on the ice again
