THE ESCAPE

Every tower arises in babble;
every ascent a confusion of tongues.
When we collapse, we collapse together.
Hubris brings ruin, but ruin makes a home,
where the door is always open, the roof
a bower of rain. Wave from this window
without glass, & take my hand, old friend.
These stones? Take all you like. Build again.

Two riders are always approaching;
they’re still a long ways off. Before the wind
rises, come sit in the shade of this dream
whose shadow is longer than its seems.
Later, we’ll climb to the sky. On what stairs?
The ones cut from prayers, from words, from air.

THE FUTURES

My bride came forth in a silver shower,
but we were still too poor to marry.
Pennies from heaven never will flower.
My bride came forth in a silver shower.

I tried to convert play into power.
Gaily, greyly, came love’s actuary.
My bride came forth in a silver shower,
too poor, too poor, too poor to marry.

MY, BUT THOSE BUILDINGS SURE ARE TALL

The City of Tomorrow burns like glass.
Sunnyside, shadyside, the furnace streets
fan out in bright shrapnel from the blast.
The City of Tomorrow burns like glass.

We’ll walk by, unacknowledged as we pass,
not unrecognized. We’ll melt all these sheets.
The City of Tomorrow burns like glass;
keep to the sunnyside, O shadyside streets.

MTV-THEORY

All these dimensions go to eleven.
The camel passes through the eye.
Robert Smith sings it’s Just Like Heaven,

though it’s summer snow behind this seven.
After many a summer, the snow will die.
All these dimensions go to eleven,

a mathematics these strings will leaven,
a superstring strummed like a pair of thighs.
Robert Smith sings it’s Just Like Heaven,

& he’s right by a factor of seven.
Every kiss kiss vibrates with good bye.
All these dimensions go to eleven,

but we’re down here in four, not eleven,
insane in the membrane of you, of I.
Robert Smith sings it’s Just Like Heaven,

only a theory, a half-formed lesson,
the truth in drag, the outrageous lie.
All these dimensions go to eleven,
every string humming, just like heaven.

THERE IS ALSO A LIGHT THAT ALWAYS GOES OUT

Oh! Fatal emblem of our happiness!

All that remains of the dream: the lighthouse
that someone drove off a cliff. It hung there,
wily, coyote-like, suspended, then
not. It hit the ground like a suitcase dropped
after a twenty-hour flight. But what,
awake, am I supposed to do with this?
Why was a lighthouse moving like a truck,
a runaway down a green-gray slope,
barreling toward the infinite meaning
of meaninglessness? I can see it, still,
hear the strange soft wheeze, the harpsichord
collapse of its fall, the sound of wood, whistling
past its own graveyard. All day, this image.
Tomorrow it’s gone. On the shrink’s couch
in some New Yorker cartoon, the lighthouse
becomes a joke, the royal road’s punch line.
It’s funny ha-ha because it’s true, true
because it’s funny-strange. But what is it?
What is any of it? In dreams I walk
with you, in dreams I talk with you, in dreams
I push you down a well, cry when you come,
take the wheel from your dead hands, & drive
until the coast appears like a brushstroke.
In dreams, you’re mine, all the time, but awake
I am yours: your slave, your toy, your rest.