Cement Cloud


You like to enjoy the moment with your family,

Even when they are Velcro'd to and rolling in dead flies.

If there is any hope, staple it to the template of your upper lip.

That will keep the fire approaching.

As I try to think, the pain that I never saw and the love that I never got

swallow up what I should have been.

But this lifting of metal wings -- I mean "hospital beds"

is now all over the ground. It's all over the ground

and one of the bellboys with their careless stories

arrives with their careless newspapers tucked under their careless

router -- some of them smiling.

Love, the second it is erased, is that horrific

yesterday when you celebrated its birth.

And as late as yesterday Nature still exists.

It's unfortunate and complex too.

There is nothing more to say.

The unmentionable odor of death and dead flies

lock-up this neutral air like a slowly-suffocated, stifling wall.

Love is something else:

your magnificent disdain, your trying to read an unreadable message,

your sleeping on a public bench, your air, your absolute sound.

Its wonderful. I mean: It's wonderful. It's the fertilization of your hand

with the sub-human robotic scum.

What is done is shut and still.

What is shrouded is hidden and about to sprout.

The honey-bees, whose barrier you submerge in plantation,

in misfortune even, take solace in this note that someone else is writing.