The heart measures in blood everything that happens.

– Ramón Gomez de la Serna

The dragon stays stuck to lampposts at the

boundaries, but looks like a mountain lizard. The

ancient poet stays in the ear, but the ink he pisses is

invisible. Emptiness stays in the river drunk on

wheat and reflects back what we thought was

dumped in the thick of a December Wednesday.

The Black Water Dragon sits in the Black Walnut

tree but the last leaf hangs on as if w/ fangs. The

old poet sings of the world that lies beyond the human

but gets no taste ‘til death. The heart stays in the

chest but appears at night as a constellation

orchestrating movement of silver-colored blood

that gains velocity in water years.

The politician stays

in the middle & the middle moves so far right can’t

see its shadow can’t tell the poem from rhetoric

can’t feel blood when it gets past the hat can’t pass

the hat to the campesinos and the amnesia gallops

in to start it all again in animal rhythm impervious

to grief.

Scorn stays west of the left ventricle

the poet says and sees it stuck there unable to

mutter anything but GRAHHR or

muuurrrrrffffffffff so writes a poem that becomes a

series of poems that becomes a house and a whole

slum of them headed for the same plight (evening)

stuck in the shithole of his imagination up near the

top of the monkey puzzle tree next to the Octopus

paxarbolis to wile away the January afternoon

hoping not to become lunch for Sasquatch/lost in

the dust of a library archive waiting to return in

another incarnation or vivid hallucination.

The Black Dragon

waiting for the poem to end

burns the bacon to a crisp.

12:03P – 1.12.12

After Xi Chuan’s Somebody and Li Bo Questions Answered