l
Torment begets restlessness.
The desperate eye spies chinks in the wall
The comfortable sot paints over
With a coat of fatty enamel.
The lethargic soul sitting in a chair
Takes in his suave comfort in silence
His eyes enchanted with artificial sleep.
Like a peripatetic cockroach
The spirit of hunger can sniff out
A shard of rotten apple ferreted away
In a cistern a million miles below
A pit of nightblack noxious sulphur.
2
A leg too short, a clouded eye
Are his talismans. Divinity
Needs spirits caressed by death
To sing with its angelic voice.
Nothing sadder ornaments a life
Than talent for pain pure as soap.
Anguish not redeemed is a cry
In a chorus of tongueless bears.
Few are happy, Bob; of those
Felicitous most are imbecilic
Easily entranced by a nipple
Others momentarily delighted
By seasonal weather. The Artist
Most civil of Chicago sheep
Can change his blood to silver
Offering a lunch of magic mutton.
There’s nothing like alchemy, Bob
To add a certain lefthanded charm
To the odor of a slaughterhouse.
3
Your meetings were a tea party
The March hare and Queen Of Hearts
Would have fled from screaming.
You fought with everybody but me.
I must have not been worth a wrestle.
Bob, you had the look of Dmitri
Karamazov, sometimes Smerdyakov.
You longed for one more Dostoyevsky
Novel worthy Of you. You liked to make
Love in public as though sex were
A cultic ceremony. Bob, you looked
For trouble. You got it. Once
You told me: “Some take drugs to be
A lunatic; I went crazy by myself.”
Bob, a nut has nothing to lose.
You threw away a part of life
With bizarre and farcical passion.
Finally they found you in a dressing gown
Propped up against a door, dead and still.
Some wonder why so many people blessed
With lives more tidy and commodious
Had given charity and duty to many
Fewer souls than you. I know why.
You were much too injured and anguished
To watch the weather and television.
