Piano is levitas;
Kahn is gravitas.
We all play roulette
sometimes without knowing it. Feudal

play is
a chain mail wall
that responds
to touch. The curve

traced by a point
on the rim
of a wheel
as it rolls along

a straight line
without slipping. Slipping
is not required. When
does a slip become

a relapse? You are the most
imperfect auditorium
absorbing and reflecting
the sound of my mind

as it hovers over deep sleep.
In the left margin,
fish scales climb
or descend.

When you write
yourself out
of the story, it becomes futile
to try to sneak back in. The acoustics

in the church
where we held my father’s funeral
captured too much
bounce and echo. No one

understood a word
we were saying. Is
an omniscient narrator
a better bouncer

than an intrusive one?
Who is more reliable?
What about the polyphonic?
I remember

writing the Ecstatic
Uptown Chronicles
in fragments with you
over drinks (and drugs)

one winter. The first
one. I was lost. I was found.
I was a wretch—so were you.
It was

exquisite—
that corpse
of a song
we couldn’t resuscitate.

Pulling glass
from his skull,
he stands
a chance

of relocating
his compass
without
a GPS.

I am
so invisible
I am
free to

If voices are hereditary,
I sing like
the dead.
The first

bridge I fell
in love with
was over
troubled water.

No more art
in the schools,
we make it here
from glitter and bat shit. Crazy

how guano
fertilizes the most
unlikely plots.
A chicken shits

on a construction paper
bingo board. You pin it
to the wall
next to the velvet

painting of a cowboy
and call it

No time to fix
errant capitalization.
I remember
first encountering

Frank Lloyd Wright
while dancing
on that bridge
over troubled water.

Architects may come
architects may

All the news
I need
is in the weather
report that is

fit to print. I am
the only living boy
in New York. I miss both—
the boy and the City.

She has one eye
looking due east,
the other northwest.
She says she can

sew him back together
if you want. Do you
want? We all want
to go

where there’s
no sound
some nights,
don’t we?