SPARAGMOS

The perfume vats have spilled,

flooding the streets of Florence with sweet

stink and there’s nothing I can do about it.

We don’t get paid a living wage

for what we do, her boyfriend

doesn’t do her when she needs doing,

and there’s nothing I can do

but sit and listen. There’s nothing

to be done when the cars continue

to rev and the brakes on my bike

don’t work, and the bank steals your world

away 9.50 € at a time—month in

and month out. And there’s no point

in touching the computer screen; you’re

two months out of touch, asking

for Gypsy change, wishing you were

Penny Rimbaud with a country

retreat safe enough for an anarchist

convention. And Max is dead,

a knife in his gut on the bed

where he let strangers fuck him

so as not to feel so alone

when strangers fucked him, alone

in the slow dismemberment that Psyche,

the goddess, never could have predicted;

her womb the center of an archaic worldview

Christ knew nothing about.

And your resurrection? Will it pay

these bills? Will it wash these windows

we look through? Will it make us whole

or wholesale?

Oct. 4^th, 2011

Florence