that moment she felt she could understand Elsa Lanchester's
dilemma everything's alive including herself
everything began with an F
as in Felix Culpa who's staggered clear from
the innards of a Holiday Inn sign in Needles the one
Victor & Dixie'd eaten Coconut
Cream Pie scribbled exquisite cadavers on napkins drunk Coc-
a Cola smoked dope in the parking lot at They were looking for
junk supposedly stashed in the bronze
Impala's glove compartment turgid as Bangkok & looked for
spaceships zooming westward like postcards through the
pink cellophane sunset stretched above the Kingman MacDonald's
Dixie chewing Bazooka
Joe Bubblegum read aloud The Poetics of Space & Dear Abby looking
for answers no one knew the questions
to the news-
print's Baskerville typeface was something else the sky spit
out another tragedy on the rose-pink
horizon another mov-
ie Nuncle Artie's masticating phone numbers during like
popcorn actually he's choking on raw
stockings this is the way the world ends he quotes he didn't look
anymore like TS Eliot sporting a Stetson than
any other compulsive masturbator he keeps his false
teeth his ballerinas his fugitive numerals in the water-
spotted glass on the dresser steeping in Polident his hands
are Raggedy Ann dolls his body's a doubleknit
suit hung-up undrycleaned in the Oldsmobile's
backseat window viewed in passing like a late night TV commercial
the sort the frolicking goddesses of banana splits
whisper true love throughout he doesn'
t think Hegelian suicide in so many words it's
a fact of life like scads of pink paper parasols scattered
across the polyurethane bar that thinks it's a mirror
of course there's not much hope for
Nuncle Artie in any purple kimono sky good-bye
I can't say I knew him that well everybody'
s alone in this world & so forth Victor for instance whose favorite
words are laughing bones fedora dope & void he does-
n't look like Robert Frost he feels like him sometimes meantime
the lounge's Bride of Frankenstein Motorola's blue
capillaries rippled the picture
Another Legend, pg. 3