ANGELS SLEEP IN PEACE!
Angels sleep in peace!
Devils stay past midnight
listen to Paganini
Pretenders, King Of America, Heartless Liars
Have you heard them playing 8-ball while reading Content’s Dream?
Did it matter when the Army closed
imagination’s terrifying halls to Strategists of Art?
No, it doesn’t make sense to matter
No explanation needed for transfer of funds
from one pocket to another
For those Charlie Chaplins entering data, boiling nouvelle shoe leather soup
Supping on Valentine’s Desires and Therapeutic seasonings
It makes sense
Angels sleep in peace!
Devils stay past insomnia
& possum scud across the roof
Listening to accusations of the trite and trivial from Fashion Fascists
Reveling in accusations of the ideal & naïve
soaked in gross dependencies & mother
Have you heard them in their drunken dance
on granite floors,
in the rhythm of Sisyphus?
Would it matter if Superman
disappeared in his glacial fortress and forgot about Lois Lane?
No, it doesn’t make sense to matter
No explanation is needed for the transfer of sperm
from one pocket to another
For Cryogenic Automatons taking surveys & grants, boiling eclectic dialectics
Gorging on Cornish hens & Sweet & Low
It makes sense
Angels sleep in peace!
Devils stay past gunshot
& sweat soaked orgies
& tender whisperings
Have you made up your mind,
in those white silk gowns,
hair loose on freckled shoulder,
licking your own nipples,
raising your naked ass to four impossible walls?
That I should be persuaded by repressed exhibitions of genitalia
Does it matter when crisis rings
the death of a poet & saw-grass fires kiss his naked guilt?
No, it didn’t add up to verse, or wake the angels to salve the clawing innocent
No, it doesn’t make sense to matter longer
No explanation needed for the transfer
of one fish from one
Amazon to one aquarium
on a bookshelf on one hill above Pacific shoreline
For Game Hunters tracking down genuine tears & renderings, boiling conceptual logic
Mounting vanquished language of invisible jaguars & hornless rhinos
On walls…
It makes sense
For those lazy drifters beneath the stars
2/21/98
—Michael Rothenberg
____
First published in Kickass Review