waking up to a cento and scrambled eggs

  and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth
and the clock that will not make me know
how to leave you

    it is difficult to think
of you without me
in the sentence
the one warm beautiful thing in the world
breathing upon my right rib
like a tree
breathing through its spectacles
fatigue shifting like dunes
while the coins lie in wet yellow sand
the waves which have kept me
from reaching you
your hand pressing all that
riotous black sleep into
the quiet form of daylight.

the eyes roll asleep as if turned by the wind
and the lids flutter open slightly like a wing.
the wind blows towards us particularly. here
are your bones crossed
on my breast like a rusty flintlock.
you smile
and pull the trigger.

oh god it's wonderful
to get out of bed
naked as a table cloth.

you had to walk through the great gate of kiev
to get to the living room.
it was autumn
by the time i got around the corner.

melancholy breakfast.
just plain scrambled eggs.
muss es sein? es muss nicht sein

mud clambers up the trellis of my nerves.

      but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky.
somewhere beyond this roof
a jet is making a sketch of the sky
i shall see my daydreams walking
down the muggy street beginning to sun.
the buses glow like clouds.
i don't glow at all
so subtly dragged away
by the silver flying machine.

you have left me to the sewers of
our most elegant
lascivious bile
where the filth is
pumped in and slanders and pollutes and determines.
a tongue given wholly to luxurious usages
while music scratches its scrofulous stomach
and the tattered cordage of my will.
my most tender feelings writhe and bear the fruit of screaming
wouldn't you like the eggs a little different today?

  ("it's a summer day
  and i want to be wanted
  more than anything else in the world.")

the toaster's electrical ear waits
without breath or distant rejoinder
as indifferent as an encyclopedia.

     the silent egg thinks.

run your finger along your no-moss mind
that's not a run in your stocking
it's a hand on your leg.
i beg you
                do not go.

(you don't want me to go
where you go
        what are you doing now
        where did you eat your
        lunch and were there
        lots of anchovies
so i go where
you don't want me to.)

and i am sweating a lot by now;
if it won't happen to me what shall i do?

i think of it on grey mornings with death in my mouth
flailing about like vipers in a pail, writhing and hissing without panic
as i historically belong to the enormous bliss
of american death.
i want to be at least as alive
as the vulgar.
i have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
with a very real humor you'd be proud of.
i accept
so much
it's like
       vomiting.

you will marry the first person who tells you your eyes are like scrambled eggs.
and if somebody does
  it’ll be sheer gravy
a final chapter
no one reads because the plot is over.

my poem is finished and i haven’t mentioned
frank o'hara.