Hanging Drywall with Gene Manning

You ripped the board down
just like you said you would.

So, we held it again with the tops
of our calloused skulls, sweltering, trembling
within a nano-inch of fainting.

Then quietly you nailed that soft board,
every square inch on aluminum stilts
until perfection was yours,
like squeezing the impossible from a finite 4 by 8 foot,
shoehorned piece of perfect puzzle
exactly the way you promised you would,
the way our trembling, sagging asses
hoped you would.

You were Merlin the Magician on stilts;
we knew that from the get-go,
the day we joined the Gene Manning legend,
West Palm Beach, 1967, the infamous
Summer of Love, the summer
of perfect drywall.

The Sudden Death of Wonder

Living on scraps in a city
of imperial smells, I know a tramp
of inconsolable friendships,
who is poorer than a lover of dead art,
a God
of empty clothes and silent imagination.
Drinking the soup of garish machines,
of crusty civilisation,
of inept doctrines,
I know a tramp of inexplicable dawns,
poorer than sticks
of gold in banks of unspiritual gardens,
who lives in a mansion
of streets, a palace of bitter drains, where
rats of the sewer pass
through his grounds like images of creation.
I offer him money in a bowl of hours but he
seeks shelter with animals of
glass, bearing waves of non-existent water.
I take him across the river to a city
of exceptional lawns, where the sun fits
perfectly into its foaming mouth. We pass
through a tunnel of wounds and into
a courtyard of winding, sulphurous dreams.
I see the fruit of dust in a tree of fallen eyes.
I draft a pitch of desert snow and clouds.
Above us grey swirling towers with concrete
wings. I follow a path of music and flames.
We drink blue water in a valley of breezes.
The sand we climb is higher than roots of air.
The city is like a spark of trembling hands.
Behind pale effigies of human suffering, the
future is like seed of broken life, stored in
sheets of time. There is the hunger of lambs.
There is the slab of stone. There is the milk
of voices, fresh with colossal names,
unburdened by images of magnificent rain and
servile floods. I offer him the sweetest knife
and he lives with a crown of death. I offer him
the younger of blood and he turns to me like
a man caressed of souls, of giant cathedrals,
who pleads for proof of innocence and light.