This poem has no shame.
It has a punk bagpiper on the Saturday morning sidewalk

who has set out a basket to collect quarters or dollar bills,
it has one silver dollar (American) and one sand dollar (Atlantic),
the Pacific and Arctic oceans fit neatly into its corners
leaving room for the Great Lakes, a gravestone, a stamp album, a
teddy bears’ picnic and more,
this poem is large enough to encompass the orbit of Jupiter without
straining,
it has black holes into which readers have been known to disappear
and never return,
this poem has a melodious doorbell and five spacious rooms,
it has picture windows, broadloom and air-conditioning,
but it has no shame, it has no soul.

This poem has sole fried in butter with lemon and a sprig of
parsley,
it has phallic symbols, womb symbols, symbols of death and
resurrection which never correspond because they don’t affix
proper postage,
this poem has bold headlines behind which burn real bodies which

don’t symbolize anything,
it has cities reduced to rubble and cities restored in plaster, it
has cabinet ministers preserved in alcohol,
but it has no shame.

It has no shame because the stars are rusty,
because the phallic symbols look like wombs and vice versa,
because the dead think this is living and the living, postage paid,
have never returned,
because its readers have short attention spans and are already
getting annoyed at this,
because some have already given it up, and for the rest of us every
second counts,
although not one in a hundred knows CPR and heart disease is the
number two killer,
through no fault of its own yet irreversibly, this poem has no
heart.

This poem is not alone,

although in nights so silent even the streets are mute and every
light has gone out in the facing apartment tower it tells
itself there is no other poem like it in the world,
and it aches with an inarticulate loneliness because it knows that
is not so,
that every poem is like it but it can phone up none of them, not
even long distance.
It has no heart because if another poem did phone it up in the
night it would curse and hang up,
because it is empty, yet doesn’t hold water, nor serve as a sieve
by separating coarse from fine,
because it is finest when it is coarsest and vice versa,
because it sings the blues without being blue and celebrates
without joy, and when it is blue does not sing at all,
because it is wise without wisdom and foolish without folly,
because it salts its words without savour,
because it never speaks on the elevator,
because it has walked in space but never in cowshit,
because it has acted out its sex fantasies but not its death wish,

because it prefers fantasy and so will be taken unawares by death,
because it drives fast through the city late at night in search of
other poems and ramming them,
because it is a poem with dented fenders rusting out,
a fatty poem carrying in it traces of pesticides food additives
battery acids,
a poem with nine cups of coffee two ashtrays and a heap of sweaty
clothing,
a poem with bagpipes, kilt of purple leather and a one-stringed
electric hockey stick,
but no soul.

A soleless shoe of a poem written on folds and folds of print-out
paper wadded to keep the rain out,
a poem with only a horseshoe for good luck
a poem that says it is prepared for the worst but imagines decay is
mere bad luck and forgetting but an interval in memory (not
vice versa),
a poem that regardless has walked in space,

that still has room for another bagpipe, for a chair wrapped in
magnetic tape, for all the planet plus the entire metric
system;
into its black hole fall the half-moon of a fingernail, the moon
itself which is full tonight, and all the moons of Jupiter;
a poem with room for more still,
because it is a horseshoe
with its ends pointed up
to catch the falling angels.

III. North/South