"Let Me Play with Your Poodle," "I Got It Bad (and that Ain't Good), and "I Won't Cry Anymore"

Let Me Play with Your Poodle

                                                                                    For Tampa Red

 

 

Lookee her O ringer in Tabasco
Lookee here O ringer in the Tabasco
Lookee here to the raisin for deliverance
Lookee here O stars on the ceiling
I want to play with resonance, resolution
I want to play with the causeway and even causality
                          Your poodle is descended from champions
                            Your poodle is a cross between a miniature and a toy
               Your little poodle dog has a secret
 
Let me play with the organic institutions
Let me play with the hollow organon
                          Your poodle was born on a stockbroker’s farm in exurbia
                           Your poodle commemorates a great victory against Pharaoh
               Your little poodle dog has a secret
 
                                        His black shaggy hair erases the distinction between fight and flight
But can I play with ice (and fire)
But can I play first fiddle and second fiddle in the same orchestra
                           Your poodle has PTSD from a German shepherd who punctured his lung
                             Your poodle snarled at Dick Bergren, who’s been dead for decades
               Your little poodle dog has a secret
 
Yeah the random deliverance
 
Let me play with the iron brides, the sausages, the eggbeaters, the elephantine finder’s fees
Let me play with the perky megacycles dedicated to our disgust
Let me play with the bongo bomb, the hard-core presence in our helmeted presentation about prudence and pudenda
                          Your poodle obeys Dad and no one else
                            Your poodle has a friend named Cocoa who belongs to a girl named Carol
               Your little poodle dog has a secret
 
Yeah Carol is too sensitive to live long in the Age of Heroin
 
I plays with sweet afterburners one day a week in the breathy Hellgate
I plays with a prudent pudendum
I plays with the regulatory regime for this ice capade, this capacity question
                          Your poodle chased cars all the way to town
                            Your poodle is both mythic and real
I mean like an unnatural disaster
             Your little poodle dog has a secret

 

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I Won't Cry Anymore

                                                       For Big Maybelle

 

 

I won’ alter the trajectory of the incoming or outgoing
 
Now that you faced the negotiation of your elementary protection racket
Now that you opened the icing and took the rescue the restitution
 
You’ve gone for the pine tree and pineapple and application
 
I’ve shed purple donuts
I’ve shed the blasted Band-Aid and open-table pilgrimage
 
Apart in the Angelino prison boxing dog
Apart to negotiate the dissolution of another empire
 
A broken heart hears for the first time a song in the background
A broken heart in the heat outside a museum of forgotten objects
 
I won’t cry anymore in the permanent echelons of disbelief your excellency
I won’t cry anymore hostages for the ice cream man pulling rabbits out of moonbeams and molecules
I won’t cry anymore you police nougat of polished horror capsules
 
I’ll just read the fine print in the night sky until it breaks off at the horizon
 
Forget the placement of the second G
 
Yeah yeah harm the leather siding and randy alligator possibilities here in this ship not of fools
 
On the early beginnings and unearthly end of memories resembling sharks in their unsmiling singlemindedness
 
Though no one answers the call of the edible ancestor
 
Love answers for the last time in its opening to holograms
 
My arms dress the mountains for the first time
 
Bye eyelet onto a wilderness of feeling so green and brown and blue
 
Cry-ee to no one about nothing never
 
Though you prefer my negligible transfers to solid soda and all-night changing systems
 
My arms inside the nightgown of the eleven askance prisoners in this folding game
 
For horses to surprise the sun
For minus signs and the omnibus performance space inside Neville Chamberlain
For perfect angels in this soup
For hard dovetails and unnecessary riders of shame
 
This ees a cellophane oligarchy with a toothache and parallel homage
This ees a horological escapade in the manner of dynamite
 
Anymore nighttime the hurt inside this radiating

 

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I Got It Bad (and That Ain't Good)

                                                      For Ivie Anderson

 

 

I
 
The way a nightmare rolls through
The way the apple falls far from the tree
The way only elephants should
I sign for everything
No songbirds ain’t the answer
 
My final heart is infinitesimal
Not made for pyromaniac storms
Not made by hands of stone
I face the methane without panties
Bad openings into farcical postilions
Bad pork management under ice
 
When fish are holdovers from fantasias
A bad boy rolls over the benign ice
Rolls all the way to the hotdog
My scotch and hightailing
Me this point inside the fiery brigade
Pray-ay-ay for helicopters to save the oval
 
 
II
 
The oracles love
To look for me
Me the right honorable
Me the piecemeal
Me the pizza
No onion
No ice cream
The fainter body
Only the sacerdotal
Only the salvage could operate
I find in these heists
These these finder’s fees
Fistfuls for the bad
Bad bombs
Bad palms
 
 
III
 
Like a lonely Salamanca Sunday
A lonely roughrider in a pantoum
A lonely easel on the docks of Hanratty
Willow of hairshirts and whips
Willow of will-o’-wisps
Lost in parallels and perpendiculars
Lost in the place of law and stasis
Wood, my chosen
Woo-oo-oo-ood of awnings and reason
Lord above the iron gate
Lord beyond the closed eyelids
Bad for pianofortes
Bad peeps and spilt milk