chapter 3
HUFFINGTON
09.23.12
poem
chests puffed up by golly nonetheless in pride. And no!
Not a commune merely but a country: It’s Charity.
And that’s a virtue too, Great Aunt Calamity: tell me Muse
what E flat played as an ha rmonic on a single string
can say to the amped-up soundtrack rocking the whole square
until the child screams and holds his ears and Dingbat’s
prancing Lipizzaner slips on the cobbled street and breaks a leg.
Then you must put him down. A mistake: They pitched
their good luck then and brained the brain-damaged boy.
All that rock n’ roll at such a volume it would surely damage
anybody’s brain. Had you been at the May parade, it would
have damaged yours. Even had you volunteered as number
one sadistic counselor. After all, it was a job.
So too the bold advance of Ivan Chesnokov right up to
the gates of Chugunov with his regiment of cavalry. They asked
him could he read and write, and could he maybe put some
order in the Orders of the Day. He took his rimless glasses
from his pocket, but did not dismount. What he did
was read aloud the lewd jokes told at the Second Congress
of the Comintern. A kind of poetry in that. A kind of horseshoe
thrown with malice at the eyes, the mouth, the balls.
Cousin Klarity, I was only at a camp but you were in camp a.
Rabbi Mordecai was putting into verse the harsh sayings
of the one from Dobryvodka called Inert.
Person of the book, Bookie of the Downbeat. Dingbats all in order
for an answer to the ringing red & black phones.