In the 26th year of my age 
I, two ears, two eyes, two hands only 
(But only is enough to take the town) 

i.
So it is, the chaos
contracted

in an unfolding scene
in five sentences:

Body. History. Evil. God. Human.   

ii.
But what ideas,
in what facts? Inside the sun

the heat is sucking
the soil’s moisture,

On the floor in an apartment
on Boston Boulevard, he knows
he’s going to die.

Jesus, the dirt on the walls
is coming from my body,
and love,

Fulton near Pearl, dug up to lay new Fulton Center 
subway power lines, a stone wall, three feet high, 
in silt-muck seven feet below street level, inside it 

Before dawn, on the street again,
beneath sky that washes me
with ice, smoke, metal. 

Aged malt whiskey and cigarettes
   consumed to enhance consciousness
—read Blake. You can’t regulate

It is the star above us makes us see
The distance of the firmament, immensity
Of the green wave that swells beneath the dark.

When Mutual of Omaha supported
nature shows, it spared us sex and gore.
We stared as peacocks preened and rhinos courted,

The aging magician retired to his island.
It was not so green as he remembered,
Nor did the sea caress its headlands