Je ne t'ai pas connu, je ne t'ai pas aime,
      Je ne te connais point et je t'aime encor moins
      ....
      Tu tombas, tu prias, comme moi, comme toutes
      ....

      (Paul Verlaine, "A Charles Baudelaire," _Liturgies
       intimes_, 1892)

_Witzelsucht_ I call the little boat
packed with all our fathers in their
little suits as green green green goes
the somersaulting frog from veiled trees
to the Forest of Witness at the arrivals
gate, which leads to a garden of decomposing
transplants--its diapason abridged by plaintive
wolver/riverine, in sum a body burdened for
Chanson or charleyhorse (your lucky dip).

Inmate of X-anguinate, I am nobody's idiot
mnemonic yet I wake up screening in the middle
distance where a night train circles a model
railroading in miniature (think of it as a
fort-da switchback _en blade_). The tunnel rat's
tail light is red or blue: which one's your baby
strictly need-to-know, like Matthew's window
a come-on, his comeback the gospel--red star or reno,
the nev add-on value of familial skin cancer nails
the asthma link bicoastally, catheter to jack knife:
Did you come all this way just to cut me dead
in the street? The spirit is lean, still
gimpy once sprung from parkerhouse TRAP (4 down), un-
A ware's the thing @stake, A1 the sauce for the goose.

Take a gander at the hairy cell (you liar), your level
esprit parched by a lame annealing oven with a side
of bishop slaw or sanderson, optional. Biome? Christ,
the word's mum even out of seasoning, alas (with an
attitude) in a chord or dance of high flies, her played-
out innings of amphibious baseball strictly minor league
to boot, lawn down when the joker saw himself under
the circumstancial: was he wearing it or kicking it,
toe-to-toe along the Avenue of the Americas? The philosopher
wants to know if fish have souls, not shoes as his hothouse
mocassins spice up the family soup, nationalistic as
romance but less sticky than searing--the wan weave of
Pallor the Tailor, who's bugging your neighborhood to pardon
the gardener they call Tomcat, mono/epigrammatically. What
Gives you your sense of porpoise, equilaterally delphic?

These queries we sing oreotorially and ration
the hibiscus on the lower east side. Whistle while
you sleep through the wind-up and you'll miss the pitch
--herein embedded as .tar patch--when the pipes, the
pipes are cawling. For mine motto, take your mojo (ASIN
Farmer Mac Gregor): let astrix be trickster, always--
_fortitudino rex tyrannus [Rio Gall] mo dhream_--wracked
up with the hats (meaning kids) in the hallways of Gracie
Mansion, that pooled nosology so purely pathogenomic as
to constitute a firesale taxonomy bespoken of Knicks or
knackered paddy wagons circling like three rings of regret:
Ocular, oscular, oracular in no particular order (I tell
a lie)--these liver rounds are for chocoholics under 72-hour
observation, their larval lampreys grafted on 0-day conditionals
of beckon-the-siren to remember-that-number, one-two-three

let's kill this waitress whois patience claiming her sink
as a drain on resources or that they're making mooovies
with her headlights: just so, marigold, repine in silver,
the clover she'd leave for the Far East, her sake ajar

Candice Ward