since the drastus poems
or since the insision piece
or since axl locked eminem in the basement
which incidentally
was proof positive that around here
we are in the crystal ball business

did I say that once already

for a long time at any rate
I have been quietly threatening myself with it
the prospect of writing poems I mean
instead of paragraphs
since most of my paragraphs at present I save
for a longer story I'm telling
with which I am taking
my sweet time

a few years ago I started working on a few poems
about a few favorite bands
and the more I revised these poems
the more I saw that most of the interesting things I had to say about the music I loved
was tending naturally toward
the accursed form of free verse

god damn you walt whitman
I hope your total victory makes you happy
out there in the cold depths of space, whose country
is bannerless

today anyhow we make it official
the last plane to jakarta
only carries poems now

see the passengers tape them text-outward to the windows
see the pilot lighting his poems on fire
see the poems trapped in a plane above the pacific
which will never run out of fuel & never land

that's where we're at now

when next you see us

we'll be getting into this here album by a band called "flourishing"

whose name
makes a person say
yeah or i can dig that
several times
in softening
tones.