Messages spelled out in stars
Bright points of someone else's daylight
Write themselves past Venus and past Mars
But Mr. Blank cannot translate them right
Messages spelled out in stars
The balcony coal-black the chump alone
Leafs through his mind's huge trash
Creased photographs sad notes a bone
A letter scrawled about some distant crash
The balcony coal-black the chump alone
The lump of coal that hurts him is his heart
Small hurricanes crash through his brain
Our inventor cannot make a part
To fix the valve that regulates his pain
The lump of coal that hurts him is his heart
An odd and spidery foreign constellation
Flickers out a note to "Mr. Mud"
Señor Blanco reads the salutation
Which seems to be in Greek and signed in blood
An odd and spidery constellation
He doesn't know and yet he knows
The letter surely deals with waste and loss
The night grows blacker and his nausea grows
Are all the stars irreparable dross
He doesn't know and yet he knows
When he reaches out he touches nothing
Mr. Blanco's heart is frozen coal
When he reaches out he touches nothing
The stars crash toward the inky pole
When he reaches out he touches nothing
--
from a suite of poems titled Twelve Études for Voice and Kazoo
published in Selected Poems: 1958-1980 (Black Sparrow Press, 1981)
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