NEWSREEL

The newsreel ends where one sticks an oar into cranes

    The old street cries     but not like dreadful months

in a war in Moscow or Siberia    but instead a street

that cries in New Orleans        Jazz has become a

young man with heavy eyes     Nothing ever returns to normal

like a flashback     Shrimp vendors  sing new songs

to housewives & children in windows above

    Does youth ever tire? Does an exhibited painting

"show itself"?   a code that is erased is a silence

   that drenches a city where the ripest young things

break into adorning shrieks over hoodlums, drunks,

rednecks, hazardous strangers--this "thing"

a Ding an sich    tip-toes around the future visage

   of an age-wrecked composition     A life-span

is the living language of a land clotted in

communities    with heavy emotional freight

to set oneself apart that excites the blood beyond

98.6     Mediocre or Meteoric      The newsreel begins

where privacy is a palette for concentration

   A wild impulse seizes me   Does "skill"   

spontaneous skill       communal skill    settle into

general ease or private discipline?    Is it much more

   appreciated? Like the dashing off of a parody

with heavy alarum    or not exacting the submissive solitude

to write but entertaining the tremor of a piano

   but unable to play it well     or a talent for

dabbling in paint or decorating a home

    Becoming "acclaimed" sounds eerie       I pierce

& press to extract the juice of "permanent errors"

    sacrificing seriatim    yolk of yore

Some houses        like city streets     are more jolly

   when silenced    where mottos are ghastly

pallor clings to every detail through thin air

    The newsreel shuffles     A poet malaxates

the carapace of continental exclusitivity

    A television scattered into fragments

This is to endure an unearthing of a preferred

    narrative    What you may prefer: watching a

German man observe his lover riding his bicycle

   along a country lane     or observing in closeups

simple pastoral tragedies     You want your life

   to be more effective    to see the "good" in

everything no matter the susceptibility or reluctancy

   like handing wilting daisies to bearded old men

that gestures effervescence like a spawning stream

   in summer's golden ecstatic lather

   Keep your Nomex on at all times so that no one

can burn you    chisel you into chiaroscuro

   Everyone wins           pass it on