Waiting on the stairs of The Mizpah Missionary Home on
Summit Avenue, the children of apostles played with
neighborhood kids and sometimes spread the gospel, warming

Their lives are turning into gold. The door
Bristles with brass, its own commissionaire—
A valedictory hand swims up

I will strike down wooden houses; I will burn aluminum
clapboard skin; I will strike down garages
where crimson Toyotas sleep side by side; I will explode

Today I wished without mercy
in the bloodless nations of the mind
that a city had gone down with you

The sky is not a glass of anything;
it winks, it’s a parable,
the kind your mother told whenever

Homepage image courtesy of Egres73, Wikimedia Commons

I asked you to have faith in me!
But the four comers of the world smile dumbly.
Envious as the mountain

Everything has its limit, including sorrow
A windowpane stalls a stare; nor does a grill abandon
a leaf. One may rattle the keys, gurgling down a swallow.

Some are drunk. Some are mumbling.
Many are solitary, each in his way fixed.
They are all happy over their very good number,

“I’m going out for a pack of cigarettes.”
  At one point in the history of our language —roughly
from the 1920s into the early 1950s is my guess —those

  I dunno about this Euphues.
Lyly’s language is gorgeous,
of course, occasionally irritating,