Lives of a Moonshine Formalist

for Adam Tavel

In one, I scraped horsedookie: off the riding boots of a dwarf tag team wrestler.
When Leithauser excreted “Metrical Illiteracy” into The New Criterion every
jackleg poet had The New: Formalism like a cold sore on their lips. My schoolmate
Vladislov and I snowshoed forever up: the ramp of a handicapped lean-to.
When I came clean to not: being an ice-veined private dick or a former one-legged
sous chef or: a Romanian underwater chicken dancer, you can see how a 36

and a 1/2-year old virgin posing as a latent: Republican must: have wished
she had known that the night before. Even your junk mail’s restless,
said Perry the ill-willy: mailman in disgust as he bounded bandy-legged
down the steps, while I tipped a brown: swiss and the mum into a reverie
of falling face first into a drift before a stepladder hammered: my pate. Did I mean to
get a boner, let a big: one, and projectile-sneeze while spinning a soup plate

at an after-school audition for the part: of Captain von Trapp? In Kuwait
City, tensions peaked in 1896 when I, The Sheik, assassinated my brother, The Emir. Annex
the emirate, cried: Saddam in 1990, destroying the National Museum’s sfumato
slide collection. When I, stone: mason and the sickly Christian Doppler’s
papa, dropped a trowel: of hod over his foot, he muttered, Autsch, the Popover Effect. It varies,
I answered in a dream when my animus asked, do: you want your throat slit on a three-legged

stool or a rolled: and tufted burgundy leather couch? Was El Nuevo Formalismo a wooden leg
tennis court Republicans used to chastise themselves for lack of imagination? Did they self-asphyxiate
in heroic couplets? Above the Corkscrew: Swamp Sanctuary boardwalk, a feathery
creature screamed, Who cooks for you? God, I posited, while: a gator bellowed & slapped with his dick
and a tri-colored night heron guarded his mate warming a clutch: of eggs in her nest.
In ’59, inside: the Carlos and Kay School of Dance, now a kosher butcher’s, Miriam’s elbow careened to

her left and broke: my nose. In the alley, letting me unbutton: her blouse, she boasted she’d been to
Marrakesh with her mama who left her in the hands of a peg-legged
maid who painted her feet with henna, fed: her figs and hashish. Before Miriam nestled
her right hand in my: unzipped pants, I woke on Cold Island in ’65 to spiders dangling: over my face.
In ’66, Borges’ Labyrinths set me on fire; in ’69: Rogellio, I married my childhood: sweetheart, Nixon’s
bad as Peron, tell me what you’re writing or: make it up. New World Order humbuggery,

cried Saddam to a chrysanthemum. Leithauser admired Jésus: Levine halfheartedly.
1803, I’m a crow shot flying off with a cheese from a dairy window; 1955, a military pronunciamento
called me to the throne. After: Watergate, La Contortionista Real grabbed my nixon
with her toes, and declared that I should execute: the three-legged
pistolet for La Reina. A midsummer mushroom: my pileus enlarged tore my volva into areolate
patches. I left the world believing Emptiness is: key to enlightenment. Long after Nagarjuna wrestled

nirvana and samsara into one: vessel brimming with nonduality, schoolmate Vladislov,
handing me a flask, of moonshine and a curate’s egg, proclaimed, Hereunto my name: is Ralph. Sometimes,
at 56, old pal, I countered, her: saltiness and my lechery knew no bounds.