Broken mirror spilt salt or scattered bread

I thought about writing about Starbucks But someone must have done that already.

I thought about going for a run: Cigarettes make mammoth these few profundities.

There must be, somewhere, through a flickering lightbulb, one of the oceans, or the redbrick house where I gave up booze, an installation where the mind half-moves, half-reigns, half speaks in the voice of Auden (or one of them).

Rimbaud is there but he’s not

But you want him to be

And he’s trying.

 I’d go to Africa too if it were 1883

I’d smoke opium but that’s out of style

I went to Brooklyn and thought it might be Montmartre

Getting in a bar fight is like stabbing your lover

When it’s winter in New England.

 I went to Paris and called it Africa—

I wrote a poem and called it a lion—

 I

 What about the house you used to go to,

On the beach?

What about the beach?

Sand reveals as much as water,

As your ankles in the rain.

 II

 We awoke in new beds,

On weekends, on thin catastrophes:

One suburban confusion after another.

That was now—then.

 III

 What the fuck, Seattle?

What the fuck?

What the fuck’s a picture got to do with it?

Warhol, Lou Reed, Nico, Rimbaud,

What have they done with ceramic,

Paper & penmanship, movement,

Hours of sunlight & bodies in orbit?

  From that time, from back then,

I sit in the coffee, I churn the fluxus,

I diagram the oscillation of the pulse,

The trembling of nerves, & the stillness of the epoch.

  Exploding Plastic Inevitables,

Futurists beneath mosque lamps whose copper domes

had electric hearts,

Manifestos & Dogma.

  I rambled in the heart of the continent,

I searched & plundered the café

I saw the garcons under hours of stone

And a magnitude of life,

  And all the times we spoke, I stopped

To think of French inconstancy,

Of the second empire, of your populism

& my energy & reconciliation &

You danced like a butterfly,

Like a pink moth in the shrubbery,

& the century, which had turned before,

was stopped in its tracks, &

  That circle of no more than three—

Thus far hath modernity brought us!—

Died in Saint Helena, died