Congress
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     The 20th

 
It was the animal with the longest name
It was the Ferris wheel around the neck of a woman
It was television most of the time it was business it was
It was a till to store your time in most of the time it was
the canebrake shuffle
the zombie vogue
the last minute twist
It was just another gesture of implication
The genocide of order
It was innovation
It was bakelite gills on paper automobiles
radon toothpaste
a snooze-button on the death knell
It was only a few decadent decades
waiting for a hitch in the rain
It was merely us
surrendering to the staff cars
between the quaint memorials
which sprang up to replace us
and only lent a tepid shade
It was imperceptibly real
It was a policeman’s interpretation
of what the modern woman wanted
when they didn’t want blindness
but mainly it was blindness
It was blind property
It was blind tinkering
with the blinding lamps of blind forgiveness
It was blindly useful
and thus useless
It was a flood of pertinence after the impertinence
and then it was impertinence once more
It was very large windows on a very small hotel
It was fumes and flames and dust and hands and heads
and panthers patrolling an off-white continuity
until we sent in the midgets
gats blazing
It was a yellow-caked ready-made
of romantic fissures filled with sponsors
It was the ascension of art to the boardroom
It was accumulated
then burned
then celebrated
then stood up
It was diplomats squeezing out the last cup of coffee
from the donkey’s tongue
It was the pulsating involvement
It was the thin blue air of dramedy
It was variety
It was talk
It was a petite balsa wood throne
a wet plastic sheet
a wet naked comrade
or two or three million
It was a disappearing act
It was a sofa painted with a target
It was a situation being investigated
by embedded receptors
It was larger than a county hospital
and smaller than a entry wound
It was responsibilities assumed
It was unfree freedom
It was terrorist children  
edging along the chalk capillaries
between Bonanza and Belsen
It was sometimes built-in
and often burned out
It was awesome in every aspect
It was a car bomb in a cartoon
It was immature
and vigorous giggling
at the car bomb in the cartoon
It was long hours
like magma wrapped in black velvet
It was motors and rotors and raspberries
It was the seduction of the jackhammer
by the dead end street
It was fish leaping into a top hat
It was promises
of poison appetites
and intimated thirsts
It was anyone else but us
It was lazy
like sails on a celebrity’s boat
It was interchangeable clarities
It was alarms and music
It was drawn to my attention
It was just
okay
Okay?
 
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CONGRESS IS ADJOURNED