What did I do this weekend? Well, Christopher Rizzo and I wrote this exquisite corpse together at Charlie's kitchen on Friday night. The rest of the weekend more or less follows suit.

GRIM LITTLE



I.



Xylophone networks

	for bruised cacophony, digits,

pick-up--say Humbuckers cannot

	sate the hunchback now peerless

		I's for dignities, mercies, violas

	in gravel diaphragms, sickly blues

in this city of Dis, disasters Cambridge-styled

	can drag a corpse to water but

		can't make it Wallace Stevens's

Pilsner Urquell, a career in safety-nets

	brandishing bouquets of wax zeroes,

		trauma stipend & distressed

		 	hambone ergonomics in C flat

		sea changes, wanton muddy eddies,

feces river	sly Styx night

wears a black hat, a blank harangued 

basque in a leper brothel,

sediment broth to sup and ring a bell

to let them know you're coming:

	city of dreadful daylight & dim

		hours read full,

dead poets ghosting loam, ready

	for sutures, a burning rhizome

		in a vacuum.

O city, he'll crank this zeitgeist through the ringer,

	dwell outside		the music box

with the faux leopards & dreadful trees. 



II.



Grimmy asks who put

	nettles in the Cheerios? Ratchet-up

a requiem for Macintoshes

	or perhaps eyes without apples,

her eyes of potatoes agog with

grog, fog thickened. "Somebody

get this guy some Prozac,"

	Grimmy gets sugar pills, fustigated,

		one lump or three?

For good measure six and dosed with sex

	indeed, a "sexed up" resume, arm chair

despot lousy with sloth & ambition--

two roads diverge and Grim Little

		equivocates a lot

			and there's a noose in the median &

				karyatid floozies. G:

is that a hand grenade or are you just

		ambivalent?

Pull the pin and swallow your wallow-pill

	and go dancing with the

		will o'wisps: there's a 

door in the swamp dontchaknow,

leeches led by suckers, saps,

		sanguine guardians of destination,

so that:

	the lobby shall be emblazoned:

"GRIM LITTLE SLEPT HERE"





III.



Sun-flare equinox armies	

	advance on his cubicle, cuticles

chewed away:

Here come the suits and a vague narrativity,

a nativity scene for

	the infant brigand:

"ONCE IN a SYCAMORE

	GRIM LITTLE was

				framed"

Pinned gold-leaf, a little mug

shadow-boxed beneath museum glass,

	a gloss of latency, prodigal

stutterer & wire-framed

by infamy, Grim inked in headlines,--

the more expensive lawyer aptly argues well.

	But what

did Grim do?

	What with the brobdignagian head rush &

the irksome police skirting

	the perimeter of

meter swiftly, shouting Breaker of iambs!

Imperative aperitifs, motifs, blank

motives, evocative votives and a wish for

	some dynamo lachrymary:

it was called dead, but it moves!

Cry cry there is no story

	worth the telling.