Paper City
Errol Miller
The modern poet’s
guide to the universe, the city
of the i-nodern poet, Me&Milady, we
cutting our life to shreds.
Out past Little Chicago
and the Sunset Club there is nothing nobler
throbbirig with pulsating diese’L eriq!nes ai-id loi-143
alluvial peninsulas extending out *L.o Doomsday.
So sorry about the unpaid b-*Llls, rrtaybe
in another lifetime ...
These times have crept by me
in a suburban rat-race I have lost-.
My good eye keeps on seeing nothiriq, like Emily
stranded in Amherst and Scott in Asheville, I’ve
only rented sachet-scented wooden premises for a while.
Then they’ll load me arid my records into
for the polite reality of tomorrow: my former
grandeur and beauty won’t make a damn,
my Tristar poems, my raging wives,
or the asbestos clotting my bloodstream, all
is lost and found again in mounds of red-clay dust.
Grey-flanneled au-Lhors from the Fiftie--, liave
warned me of impending storms, fire
and brimstone and wretched blazing holes
whose blackness is illuminated by burning flesh.
I cry for all of us oriented towards despair.
My dingy friends, I cannot help you,
soon it will be suppertime in Dixie, ill
Ocean Springs and Yazoo City, Ash Flat
and Montevallo, such masterful meri we- seenied
like hounds howling at the sky above, we overcame
nature and stone walls and pushed
the demarcation line further: oitward, we
were never free, rebounding from the craft and style
of a greater nautical force to sail the lakes
and ponds of Eartl-l ill a makeshift Ark.
There are, of course, two of each species,
the good ones and the bad ones traveling together.
“Not by bread alone,” the huddled masses utter.,
tired and weary under the molted eagle’s beak.
Next year, in autumn, whell interc(-)Urse
isn’t possible and discourse is over,
there’ll conie a da,i at sLjjtiicic-r’c-; tlld,
flapping like a fish: staring
into the setting sun a man can
read the writing in his flimsy manuscripts,
lying down alone somewhere between
fermenting figs and ripe peaches
and the shade of the Baptist Church.
