They gave me a choice I didn't want: the fate
of a twenty-three-year-old man named
   Frank Spencer Robertson,

wdn't it be silly to be serious, now:
I mean, the hardheads and the eggheads

are agreed that we are an absurd

There is no place like the unbearable ribbon
of highway that cuts the Midwest into two unequal

Listen to the unforgivable birds
piercing cold sky and singing like needle and thread
and feel for the scar splitting your eyebrow.

The birds don’t sing around the bungalow,
They cough, they sputter, congregate and yell.

his wrists throbbing under tight-bound cords,
the slender joints reddening, each of us hoping
to catch his other-blooded kind of time.

Yet I knew something of how a hero’s wife lived,
      the marble throne of patience at her back.

The music stares to fade. And you’ll be gone
before I write the lines you asked me for.

A redhaired man in a rusty salt & pepper van

If you want to do something you have to do it yourself

Your mother said it was all right for you, he said

I flew onward alone, north
in my Mallard Sprinter, accompanied
by charm and ignorance and that old American