The Dirty Tunnel

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I Am Assured By The Present Hotel Management
 
 
 
I am assured by the present hotel management Hotel Marginal
That the seaweed rifle lying upon the coral pillow
Belongs to that swan seen last in Voltaire’s rendering pot
At the lobby’s crossroads
Holothuroidea forms a doily on the piano
And cholesterol lines the keys
Plumbline that rape
Is sung every spring in Paris     I am assured
By a woman’s red algae arm
Washing up upon the Library of Congress steps
Is an elevator
Is the prosthetic heart
Is Chaplin’s refrigerator
In the woods    in the woods    in the hepatic woods
Full of cathedral wheelbarrows
Which freight jellyfish tendril candles TNT
To Westmoreland’s exotic dancer daughter
Rosie Bloom
To excite her rosary of pink magnetic trout
Tangled in a slag halo
Seen last in a screen door in Kansas The Star Tribunal
How like a hyena’s broach her coffee
The bottom of each cup to be liberated
By a disrobed army with undulant stingers
F. americana
How like an aerosol of starlings this flag near the washroom
Her soldiers of frozen brachia spurt
Classified under Mirror Admirer
Where are the handles and needles
Where the needless hamlets     The headless omelets
Child socialite talking to a grasshopper
I am assured in the kit cooked
In the whalebone antelope’s headlights
Criss-crossed by the aphids of Mesopotamia
Ptomaine pale
As the Hittite girl’s boiled feather telephone
Its frail blonde railings
Curling along an anthracite beach
Drowned celebrity in the paté shadows of the Kookaburra
The primitive’s microscope kissing the Arctic’s SST
Another principle     Another private room made of nutmeg
And I am assured another Queen Margaret’s milk kiosk
Chalk hydraulics of florists in every Haiti-shaped leaf
Fallen from a rocking-horse in a maternity hospital
Timorous starlings asleep amongst the midsummer’s wheat-diamonds
Whose blind freedom smokes a braille cigarette    Not a cucumber
In a slaughterhouse lined with snowed-in gendarmes
Like a box of Cuban walnuts
And not at all amusing    Reassembling the hammocks of quinine
I am assured attached by the wing muscles to an avalanche
The hirsute tram engine inscribed
OPHÉLIA IN OKLAHOMA
Where we instantly recognized    What were hyacinths
Asleep on balsa treadmills
Sphinx-bells of the first woman
Inside the box
A rain’s hands
Inside a dry envelope
A sunlight’s shins
Coming for us up the hallway.

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Make yourself at HOME