drunken man on a bicycleBy Dan Butterworth
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1.
A drunken man on a bicycle tumbles over streets
like a crumpled paper in the wind of history--
behold the miracle of flying trash, animal
shapes rich and strange: top hat horse head,
dinner jacket monkey, ferret and weasel
dealing five-card stud at the conference table—
marvel at the polished sheen of this inscrutable
now. Step right up: watch the raveling
of the feral woman, witness the juggling hands!
For we have decreed sacred this manner of inebriation,
this monkey riding the back of a dog, godlike,
our adorations gathering as insect clouds
over the muddy waters of our borders, malarial,
heretical. Hush for the conjuring spell, marvelous
prestidigitation! For we have canonized this chaos
of handlebars, this zigzag careening through
the morning commute, this hit and run of spectators
frozen in testimony, infectious—maybe you, maybe me,
as the turning of the bicycle weaves
and veers to eat the world up.
2.
Look: the mind’s windy places, secret
and wandering, fill with antic shadow,
with flotsam from underworlds of blood
and hunger, as a sham fury seizes synapse
and cell, contorts the private spaces
into marketplaces, into dread and trivial theater
drawn with chartered streets where once sang
lullabies of winter and moon, now doodled
apocalypses with clown horns and shoes.
We watch the shadows prance across a screen
and marvel as a gun becomes a magpie,
death a mouse in motley, the machine of state
a bicycle, Lord Chaos, a drunken man shape-
shifting as the wind of the mind drifts and palls.
Step right up, Ladies and Gentlemen, one and all!
We are the sad and rapturous Americans,
gunpowder connoisseurs, rubes and dupes, suckers
and sages, traitors and patriots, the enamored crowd,
brutal and incredulous, furious and mad--
3.
He rides the wind from his own mouth
as it fills invisible sails
of rumor and conspiracy,
fictive worlds blooming in his wake,
fleurs du mal, algae eating up the oxygen
in the self-same pond that is his mind--
O Kingly brain—creating one ocean
of self, receptor agonists and neurotoxins
alike declaiming verses in prophecy,
silken parachutes
of circus tents
to bless elephants and giraffes,
dressing the chimpanzees in ballroom
guise, colonizing our cerebellums,
whip, cane, scourge, and flage,
(Poor Tom’s a-cold)
with cartoons of dung and arsenic.
4.
The theater loves its monkey: electric
child, darting over the skull’s furniture
climbing the starlit dome, tiny proscenium,
on rumor of storm and war from the far pavilions.
Our vervet nervously picks the teeth of a baboon,
smoothes the strings of the puppet with affection.
And suddenly a new birth—Imperial Decree--
eats up our thoughts, affections, dreams, the day’s
little plans and comforts, swallowed in the shadow
of billowing tent as the monkey whimpers for
the pony-riding dog, for giraffes straining
their alien faces against the radiation from facsimiles
of bellowing clowns, the famed performers, purveyors,
sleights of hand. The theater loves its monkey,
the dimensions of its secret rooms,
the music of everyday, voices from the garden,
applause for the clever quip, the committee table
triumph, the saucepan victory. But read in the eyes
the fixed attention, imagining the rousted salute,
the cartoon report drawn in blood, artillery echoing
through the hills of the approaching weather.
November is the cruelest month: Run Monkey, Hide!
The lever you pressed for candy now delivers shock,
but you keep pressing to burn, to weep and burn and mock.
5.
The man on the bicycle believes he is America.
He rides the cities and plains, intoxicated.
Maybe like me, maybe like you,
he climbs the ladder of weeks, a clown
on a wind-up scooter with a wheel that limps.
He imagines he is hauling bones of enemies,
but they are the ribs and femurs of a king in a sack,
but they are heavy and wheeze as he rides,
but the sack is his body and the bones are his own,
but he steers toward a shiny bauble at the curb,
a silver rattle he can shake to remind
himself that he is king and scepter of the world.
6.
A tide of faces rises on his screen, a field
in spring after rains, before drought. The child
he carries inside climbs his ribs astonished
that so many have traveled to Earth from
whatever stars to peer out of these hollow
eyes of oxidized bronze. Bells ring down
the beginnings and the endings as time
rages above the faces in tongues of flame.
He surveys tombs of men who ruled and died,
of women who ruled and died, and painters
who rendered the gestures and motions as women
and men: naked or nun, impresario or clown.
Maybe he’s them, maybe he’s us. Maybe this
is metaphysical theater he mistakes for simple
circus, Punch and Judy, the awkward puppets
splayed beneath loosened strings, where
he points to the fire-eater, the contortionist,
illusionist and knife-thrower—and we ask, Daddy
what are those men doing behind that curtain?
He says: don’t you want to see the naked lady too?
7.
The child inside him squeezes the man’s heart
in his hands to drain the darkness. Where greatness?
he asks and scans TV Guide. Now the child covers
the bicyclist’s eyes from behind and the whole
balancing act teeters, a stone street trapeze,
Tiresias’s eyes blinded by a naked Venus of himself,
as if careening through this flood of faces he might
extinguish the image. But no, pyrotechnics flare,
the child’s hands a miracle of loaves and fishes
scattering across mall and piazza, the crowd’s accordion
dilations like birds flocking in wind over the river
to avoid the magic bicycle as it casts spells
and curses, a hanged man rattling in the spokes.
The drunkard rolls beyond control through
an old banker’s heart, through pockets of merchants,
ledger books of bloodwork paid in gold and silver.
He fishtails through sodden plaster, through crowds
of pilgrims along the muddy river and over
the stones that are the body of civilization as it sleeps.
He wobbles like an Etruscan, almost driving
into their same dark soil with their words and gods
a cumulous contrail behind his metal horse.
Besotted with his sole self image naked and devouring,
his great star rises and sets beyond wisps of hair-like cloud.
8.
The drunk on the bicycle is America and its king,
is the crowd and ghost of crowd, he is the sleeping
part of the mind, the ranges where geometrical
shapes of urge and fallacy swim in amniotic darkness,
Babylons of desire, Jerusalems of memory,
the lace and stone corners where birds and apes
have gone haywire in imagination’s mausoleum.
The bicycle steers its own course through a hall
of mirrors where etched script traces stories
of the plagues—here a map scorned face and tribe,
there stands a man in tin where the blood and flesh
wrung out long ago, here demons wore a path
over mountains, there demons mowed the villages,
as if to say these are the yourselves you used
to be, you walk the streets to dream and sing
in the emptiness: me my little self am this I
an animal singing in the new world’s reliquary.
The bicycle weaves through a Gettysburg
of becoming and dreams itself as the only tin, the only
aluminum facsimile of candleflame in the damp cellar
of dark-swallowing light reborn as acetylene torch.
9.
A clown on a bike! We laugh, we cringe, we cry,
what can go wrong, we wonder, moments before we die.
His elliptical motions a delirium, his huffing
breath spawn of words as cartoon monsters,
squadrons of machines, bristling with missiles,
famine and war bursting like thought bubbles
from the burlesque of a body as it weaves. We thrill
at the force of the man as a bicycle morphs
into tank and turret—but is it in a dream he flicks
battalions from his shoulder with a sneeze? We
only see the syphilitic jester, the chimpanzee
bullying his way to the front of the line with daddy’s
swag, for the imponderables of the child
in the control room configuring himself as a man
who scratches an itch at his back with whole economies,
sneering at entire cities as if they were mosquitoes,
knocking over forests like Alamos in a game of skittles,
for the horror drowns into a whimper. The bicycle
of the imagination steers like a fish in air,
unstable, insecure, a wavering gaze,
a stumbling clutch of smoke, inebriate, debauched,
surfing on the contempt pumping through his own heart
so full of gasoline it blinds him to the pure sway
of stasis, to the still point he might find and hold,
and delivers him into the inertia of asteroids in orbit.
Maybe you laugh, maybe you cry, maybe you sleep
and dream: no body forgets how to ride a bike,
the taste of candy, the thrill of circus tents billowing
in the wind of childhood—Mommy, why is the Ringmaster
grabbing the trapeze lady, why is he falling down?
10.
And now all the mad people are speaking into their hands:
Behold the colored whirligigs above the Congress,
the painted horses galloping in a ring!—here
a Bush stepped on a stone, there a Kennedy
combed her hair, look at the way that façade shapes
the sky, how the dome becomes massive against
the storm of change. Now the crowd raise their hands
to prove they were here before the world was free,
and now they turn their hands to carving
a nation into sunlit chiffons, now they wrestle demons
into the earth, death by drowning, death by arrow,
death by sword, death by edict, death by directive,
death by mercury and arsenic, death by demon air--
beautiful death by ink sluiced off newspapers
into tinctures of anger and confusion, death to all
but the immaculate self, tax-less and finally free--
what a show. The biggest crowd ever.
Voices rise to hail the invention of a new
mathematics, new words blare like bassoons
and charters and decrees to spin it all up
in a giant cocoon so they can give birth
to freedom as dark matter, ink the intoxicant
free from words, free from meaning, free
from anarchist’s slogans, free like machines
with wings, like monkeys with leathern wings
chattering across a cobalt sky. The drunken man
on the bicycle follows his wheels where they
lay tracks of a new language weaving through mud,
a new tongue twisted into dark screens
as a Babel of people speak into their palms
where ghosts have gathered according to the spell:
O let us drink the moon and light our way
with candles and follow a trail of wax
as the wheeled contraption cranks
the drunken man home—all ye all ye home come free.
11.
A Napoleon in motley, a Medici in rags,
a Machiavelli of the people. His wheel razes
crooked roadwork stones—let us number them
so we can re-assemble the puzzle the way some
Khrushchev or Goebbels, some Stalin or Mao
will recognize as history’s inevitability. Let us dream
some deep chemical architecture of a new nation
to fresco over the ashes of memory. Pace the towers
of the Khan, O Senator, prowl the towers of the inebriate
King, O Congressman, pace the broken crenellations
and scout for rumor from seas, pace the battlements
beyond the rising rivers, beyond waters pressing the wall,
cheer the siege with saltless foes, grind the enemy’s
palaces to dust, destroy the narcotic televisions,
burn the veils of silk, strafe the caravans and turn the sand
to glass. Read the flight of crow, the fire’s ash, augury
of tea leaves in the cup, prophesize gold in futures
of arsenic and polonium. Trade alphabets like pilgrims,
cast the Phoenicians and Greeks into a copper pit,
bargain for astrolabes to navigate the bays, climb
the profit sheets on a ladder of ribs cured
from the carcasses of your slaves, piss on the agonies
of the old wars the piss of vodka and gasoline,
hammer failed hope into a facsimile of a horse
in tin and ship it to an antique market, stamp a dull dollar,
florin, or ruble and awaken the muddy river of your America.
Rise again like matin bells flaring over the rooftops and sing
our past to parchment, powder the eggshells, spit on the coffins,
eat breadcrumb and marrow and declare your nation in Cyrillic.
Follow the dopplering of the motorcade, trace the path
of your soused shadow toward an uncertain star
in the middle distance that burns through sleep
against a terracotta dome, against a tower some Cosimo
watches anxiously to execute the hour’s newly minted curse.
12.
If there’s a form inside a thing, like a human
shape inside a rock, then there’s a miracle
of balance inside a drunk on a bicycle
navigating the streets of the brain--
maybe he just cannot lose. Congressmen
leech mutability like phosphorous
into the flickering crowd
almost knocking the king from his seat
atop a contraption of wire and steel
some fool sketched in a notebook
so this huffing dervish could go forth
to raise his flag of money
where the pandemonium of history
refuses to die on a chalk-silhouette street.
We are composed of newspaper, rag, cigarette butts,
emulsifiers, wool, and a gold florin.
Some prince’s man watched a drunkard
on a horse once and invented the cantilevered
arm. That is how we abandon nature for art--
not to praise some god who remains aloof,
but to hail the King, to worship the thing burning
inside him like Dionysius’ ruby bead: our crimson flail.
13.
Grief brings the minstrel to the old city
where corporate towers were built in stone
that only dreamed of plastic and strontium,
where the first corporate engines ate a fuel
of dye and blood and minted nickel reveries--
O lost home between fields and citadel,
O fatal renaissance, fevered dream,
O pool of demons who rise and flood furies
through my mind to drown the child inside,
some poor Lorenzo or Lincoln swept up
by memory’s distortion of time’s waters,
some Roosevelt a duke smiled to scorn
while still holding my slender slats of rib
to peer out at his future: a crowd
weighed down with purses and bags who step
on stilts like herons poised to stab at minnows.
I cycle against the tide, the throng, the groundlings
under the loggia. I ride through all these selves
staring into their hands as they go.
I sing and try to rise above the swirling radionuclides
but falling fail, drown and drop, orphean.
The underworld has many windows
open to the narcotic of widowed night.
The present moment is an ancient place.
It rises in towers above our towns,
above this you, above this me, above the shore
where Pluto fills his digital well to baffle
a revenant . . . . even a drunkard knows the length
of his hand. We ride somnambulant, a trinket
on a mobile’s scale, a clown rowing a Napoleon
hat through a madman’s blueprint of the near future
or recent past, a balancing suspense that cannot last
like wind from the east, as if time had seen its ghost.
Poor Tom. Peace, Smulkin. The violets wither.
14.
Witness: when the drunken man rides his bicycle
through the piazza, we recoil and advance
like mice at the mercy of his whims: now he bumps
the fruit vendor, now he glances off the window
at the bank, now he knocks over the woman
with sacks of groceries—passersby catch the oranges
and apples and bottles but the drunkard he lifts
his hand in triumph: what dexterity, what balance,
what a man! A taxi smashes into the pharmacy
to avoid the wheeling bike, the man on the church
steps flinches as more broadcast groceries arc
toward him in a trajectory of circus colors.
The scene unfolds with logic and necessity,
and however reluctant we may be
to devote ourselves to him, a part of us gives it up
for the randomness of what he’ll do next,
for the careening of the wheels, for the tossed
curse and catcalls as he lifts his legs
into the shape of a nun’s wimple athwart the frame,
balance askew, final catastrophe now certain.
And it is like both the strophe and antistrophe
of old tragedy and the child whose antics
dominate the room. Caution and concern
become the edge of their own cutting blade
as a virtual somersault, like the inebriate tumbling
over cartoon cobblestones in a cartoon fit,
spills pedestrian blood like graffiti against the walls.
15.
On the stage it’s a monkey riding a bicycle,
but in the world beyond the mind, balloons
are bombs, antics and hijinks are carnage
and war, feint and bluff are rebar
and white hoods. On the stage the tyrant is a toy,
in the world, murder. A simple sneer
and a whole people maligned, a gesture
of self-promotion, sleeves shot at the expense
of an entire race, a swerve, a honking of the toy
horn, a clown flares smilingly, the monkey primping,
stoking the furnace of self idolatry, stroking the tiny
member with a grin. Too, the nation’s monkey
mind, barbarous and trivial, flickers
in the imagination of continents, a smirk flashes
over the mirrors of self and the illusions multiply
in the lurid light of the baboons’ crimson asses’ glow.
The audience is gullible, sincere, naïve, trembling,
half in love with the wag. Then the network spills
its headline: Jesus must have been a hater too, love
his lash and whip. Blessed are the righteous,
for they will vanquish the losers. We retreat
to the altar of television and screen, for sex
and bedtime stories in thrall of the monkey
and his coined wilderness. See the cigarette
in the adorable grip of the baby chimp, see
a thousand fires smoldering in the nation’s upholstery.
Each crimson coal bores a hole through eternity
to the underworld of dreams, anorectic
and chemical, drowned in the pupil-blackened
hatches tattooed against the believers’ scored palms.
Violent night, holy night.
16.
Surely we’ve come to the end of something,
the end of the same thing we thought we saw die
when B-52s climbed the whirligigs of jungle
trees and shut their eyes against the napalm,
when drenched sands redeployed the groans
with pit-bulls and the hard-wired genitals
of the enemy were renditioned in old palace walls.
Were we bankrupt all along, those false hopes
we called enlightenment and renaissance
dying all these years from heartworm wheedling
doubt into sawdust however much we wished
to have, along the battlements, the muffled darkness
unfold to reveal some origin or answer, either right
or wrong? Surely we have travelled here
to see some tangle of hope and despair loosened
at a border crossing under shade of a mesquite,
only to find a wounded king fishing in the mud,
a sick queen disguised as a beggar to undo
desire or desire’s obliteration—surely we have
travelled here to find something that will make us
feel whole again, or purposefully broken,
a code switch obscure scribes predicted
on a master stone a dead age scored and read
eons ago that will make us say this is our us:
this is what and what for, this the room,
this the bed, this the door that leads to a door,
this the word that found a home on our tongue
before it died in our ears, before it turned to ash,
this the gorgon face tattooed on the wall
of an inconsequential heart. And now a monkey
riding a scooter on a horse’s back—maybe it’s you,
maybe it’s me who wears an impresario’s top hat,
ringmaster whip in hand to beat down the humanity.
Sleep, Nuncle, sleep. Poor Tom will make him
weep and wail, his horn is dry. They will lay him
in the cold ground, at his heels a stone.
Pansies for thoughts.
17.
A clown serving plums to a voracious queen:
we know enough to know this is how it begins,
crumbs of words sprinkled across the dark
pool that opens inside an ego’s screen. Furies
clamber up ribs, their faces surfacing like fish
taking shapes of desire that never died. And now
they morph and molt, swell and worm,
shed and ming from the atoms of the broken
centuries. This is what the old debris do
in fertile earth: seek and find their way to light,
the tubers half rotten, half green with rot,
ancient hatreds, buried jealousies. The end of peace
begins with war, roots of blood stirring
in new dirt. A monstrous imagination
gestates, disseminates fire and blood,
seeks purchase in the soil of the angry class.
Must all the monsters we slay wear our own faces?
(The child within slew me with just this sword
to cut the old man’s ravings: rosemary, rue).
18.
We need a Medusa at this end of things,
a head of hair composed of snakes.
We need to cut out a heart and eat it
in the marketplace of this America,
we need to hold up Perseus’ head
as the emblem of the new gorgon
the colonizer of minds, weaver of illusions--
O Child: decipher the aged stains
we read as prophecy growing up
from age’s dregs in childhood’s cup.
19.
America grows old. Mesmerized, scripted
on a screen, we watch the man on the bicycle
careen in antic shapes of a clown, a wind-up
toy or grainy cartoon with a wobbly music
of Betty-Boop or Popeye, saint or Madonna
in a black and white film or school-kid doodles
in a tablet turned flip-book—look at the man
who holds his brain like a flute of rare vintage
precarious over the cobblestones, look at his dog,
Little John, race ahead in a dream of rut
through the ancient arcades.
Look at the pantomime desire apes
aping desire, a monkey on a tin horse,
calavera on a cattail reed:
Step up right this way!—watch a man
turn into a spume of dust, watch a nation
crumble into a spatter of zinc and neurotoxins.
Behold the drunken man on the bicycle
veering over the flagstones of history,
smashing monuments like stale cookies
groping the perfumed bodies pressed
against a wall. . . . listen to the laughter
of the crowd . . . . there’s a mouth on a drunken
bicycle floating on a blue ocean,
a voice whose wheels ride on currents
from his own lungs, the thermals his voice
amplifies in his cave and in the world
rising now as, airborne, he teeters toward
you and toward me, toward the opiate
oblivion of a trinket vendor’s stall.
20.
Our faces are trinkets in a vendor’s stall,
ears are nests a crow’s lust for glitter
has feathered with silver.
The King colonizes the weak places.
A fontanel erodes under weather
of a radio voice. A god worms
the apple where the vulnerable
flesh of fruit has built its private
sweetness. The whine of a blood angel
tells history how it must unfold,
how flesh will become juice,
how the self will be deployed
in wars as the host cheers for madness,
as the nation thrills to be a toy
in the hands of a drunken man,
a bauble to juggle, words as toys
in the teeth of the drunken man,
whose medieval locomotions assemble
civic order of catapult and wagon.
Not me, not you, but hailed
as the only purity,
the one wild card,
infused with his own blood,
flush with chemicals and courage.
American, the original word,
the only beginning,
the only brave word.
21.
Hog in sloth,
fox in stealth,
dog in madness.
Come, unbutton here.
Maybe it was only
a small coin,
to have been so easily
given away,
our America.
We must wear
our rue
with a difference,
savor
the world’s eating.
22.
Somewhere beyond the reach
of nation we remember voices
outside the window
beyond the hedge,
maybe you, maybe me,
sunlight and headlights
shifting across a wall,
plastic men in cinderblock
puddles, all bright as colors:
cars, flavors, sounds.
Somewhere beyond
the reach of nation you and I
remember the animal
building its nest in the shadow
of a well where
a traveler stops for water.
Somewhere beyond
the wrenching
and the howls,
drink, Traveler,
and be confused again.
23.
A canvas tent folds into steel and air
and Monkey sleeps on the neck
of a horse. Baboon murmurs
against the solar plexus
of the contortionist.
The world fills with smoke
and lavender.
Pilgrims begin a road
paralytics and lepers limped
in darkness.
The kilns forge gorgon masks.
Fragments. Sparks.
Houses of paper shift in wind.
A drunken man on a bicycle tumbles over streets
like a crumpled paper in the wind of history--
behold the miracle of flying trash, animal
shapes rich and strange: top hat horse head,
dinner jacket monkey, ferret and weasel
dealing five-card stud at the conference table—
marvel at the polished sheen of this inscrutable
now. Step right up: watch the raveling
of the feral woman, witness the juggling hands!
For we have decreed sacred this manner of inebriation,
this monkey riding the back of a dog, godlike,
our adorations gathering as insect clouds
over the muddy waters of our borders, malarial,
heretical. Hush for the conjuring spell, marvelous
prestidigitation! For we have canonized this chaos
of handlebars, this zigzag careening through
the morning commute, this hit and run of spectators
frozen in testimony, infectious—maybe you, maybe me,
as the turning of the bicycle weaves
and veers to eat the world up.
2.
Look: the mind’s windy places, secret
and wandering, fill with antic shadow,
with flotsam from underworlds of blood
and hunger, as a sham fury seizes synapse
and cell, contorts the private spaces
into marketplaces, into dread and trivial theater
drawn with chartered streets where once sang
lullabies of winter and moon, now doodled
apocalypses with clown horns and shoes.
We watch the shadows prance across a screen
and marvel as a gun becomes a magpie,
death a mouse in motley, the machine of state
a bicycle, Lord Chaos, a drunken man shape-
shifting as the wind of the mind drifts and palls.
Step right up, Ladies and Gentlemen, one and all!
We are the sad and rapturous Americans,
gunpowder connoisseurs, rubes and dupes, suckers
and sages, traitors and patriots, the enamored crowd,
brutal and incredulous, furious and mad--
3.
He rides the wind from his own mouth
as it fills invisible sails
of rumor and conspiracy,
fictive worlds blooming in his wake,
fleurs du mal, algae eating up the oxygen
in the self-same pond that is his mind--
O Kingly brain—creating one ocean
of self, receptor agonists and neurotoxins
alike declaiming verses in prophecy,
silken parachutes
of circus tents
to bless elephants and giraffes,
dressing the chimpanzees in ballroom
guise, colonizing our cerebellums,
whip, cane, scourge, and flage,
(Poor Tom’s a-cold)
with cartoons of dung and arsenic.
4.
The theater loves its monkey: electric
child, darting over the skull’s furniture
climbing the starlit dome, tiny proscenium,
on rumor of storm and war from the far pavilions.
Our vervet nervously picks the teeth of a baboon,
smoothes the strings of the puppet with affection.
And suddenly a new birth—Imperial Decree--
eats up our thoughts, affections, dreams, the day’s
little plans and comforts, swallowed in the shadow
of billowing tent as the monkey whimpers for
the pony-riding dog, for giraffes straining
their alien faces against the radiation from facsimiles
of bellowing clowns, the famed performers, purveyors,
sleights of hand. The theater loves its monkey,
the dimensions of its secret rooms,
the music of everyday, voices from the garden,
applause for the clever quip, the committee table
triumph, the saucepan victory. But read in the eyes
the fixed attention, imagining the rousted salute,
the cartoon report drawn in blood, artillery echoing
through the hills of the approaching weather.
November is the cruelest month: Run Monkey, Hide!
The lever you pressed for candy now delivers shock,
but you keep pressing to burn, to weep and burn and mock.
5.
The man on the bicycle believes he is America.
He rides the cities and plains, intoxicated.
Maybe like me, maybe like you,
he climbs the ladder of weeks, a clown
on a wind-up scooter with a wheel that limps.
He imagines he is hauling bones of enemies,
but they are the ribs and femurs of a king in a sack,
but they are heavy and wheeze as he rides,
but the sack is his body and the bones are his own,
but he steers toward a shiny bauble at the curb,
a silver rattle he can shake to remind
himself that he is king and scepter of the world.
6.
A tide of faces rises on his screen, a field
in spring after rains, before drought. The child
he carries inside climbs his ribs astonished
that so many have traveled to Earth from
whatever stars to peer out of these hollow
eyes of oxidized bronze. Bells ring down
the beginnings and the endings as time
rages above the faces in tongues of flame.
He surveys tombs of men who ruled and died,
of women who ruled and died, and painters
who rendered the gestures and motions as women
and men: naked or nun, impresario or clown.
Maybe he’s them, maybe he’s us. Maybe this
is metaphysical theater he mistakes for simple
circus, Punch and Judy, the awkward puppets
splayed beneath loosened strings, where
he points to the fire-eater, the contortionist,
illusionist and knife-thrower—and we ask, Daddy
what are those men doing behind that curtain?
He says: don’t you want to see the naked lady too?
7.
The child inside him squeezes the man’s heart
in his hands to drain the darkness. Where greatness?
he asks and scans TV Guide. Now the child covers
the bicyclist’s eyes from behind and the whole
balancing act teeters, a stone street trapeze,
Tiresias’s eyes blinded by a naked Venus of himself,
as if careening through this flood of faces he might
extinguish the image. But no, pyrotechnics flare,
the child’s hands a miracle of loaves and fishes
scattering across mall and piazza, the crowd’s accordion
dilations like birds flocking in wind over the river
to avoid the magic bicycle as it casts spells
and curses, a hanged man rattling in the spokes.
The drunkard rolls beyond control through
an old banker’s heart, through pockets of merchants,
ledger books of bloodwork paid in gold and silver.
He fishtails through sodden plaster, through crowds
of pilgrims along the muddy river and over
the stones that are the body of civilization as it sleeps.
He wobbles like an Etruscan, almost driving
into their same dark soil with their words and gods
a cumulous contrail behind his metal horse.
Besotted with his sole self image naked and devouring,
his great star rises and sets beyond wisps of hair-like cloud.
8.
The drunk on the bicycle is America and its king,
is the crowd and ghost of crowd, he is the sleeping
part of the mind, the ranges where geometrical
shapes of urge and fallacy swim in amniotic darkness,
Babylons of desire, Jerusalems of memory,
the lace and stone corners where birds and apes
have gone haywire in imagination’s mausoleum.
The bicycle steers its own course through a hall
of mirrors where etched script traces stories
of the plagues—here a map scorned face and tribe,
there stands a man in tin where the blood and flesh
wrung out long ago, here demons wore a path
over mountains, there demons mowed the villages,
as if to say these are the yourselves you used
to be, you walk the streets to dream and sing
in the emptiness: me my little self am this I
an animal singing in the new world’s reliquary.
The bicycle weaves through a Gettysburg
of becoming and dreams itself as the only tin, the only
aluminum facsimile of candleflame in the damp cellar
of dark-swallowing light reborn as acetylene torch.
9.
A clown on a bike! We laugh, we cringe, we cry,
what can go wrong, we wonder, moments before we die.
His elliptical motions a delirium, his huffing
breath spawn of words as cartoon monsters,
squadrons of machines, bristling with missiles,
famine and war bursting like thought bubbles
from the burlesque of a body as it weaves. We thrill
at the force of the man as a bicycle morphs
into tank and turret—but is it in a dream he flicks
battalions from his shoulder with a sneeze? We
only see the syphilitic jester, the chimpanzee
bullying his way to the front of the line with daddy’s
swag, for the imponderables of the child
in the control room configuring himself as a man
who scratches an itch at his back with whole economies,
sneering at entire cities as if they were mosquitoes,
knocking over forests like Alamos in a game of skittles,
for the horror drowns into a whimper. The bicycle
of the imagination steers like a fish in air,
unstable, insecure, a wavering gaze,
a stumbling clutch of smoke, inebriate, debauched,
surfing on the contempt pumping through his own heart
so full of gasoline it blinds him to the pure sway
of stasis, to the still point he might find and hold,
and delivers him into the inertia of asteroids in orbit.
Maybe you laugh, maybe you cry, maybe you sleep
and dream: no body forgets how to ride a bike,
the taste of candy, the thrill of circus tents billowing
in the wind of childhood—Mommy, why is the Ringmaster
grabbing the trapeze lady, why is he falling down?
10.
And now all the mad people are speaking into their hands:
Behold the colored whirligigs above the Congress,
the painted horses galloping in a ring!—here
a Bush stepped on a stone, there a Kennedy
combed her hair, look at the way that façade shapes
the sky, how the dome becomes massive against
the storm of change. Now the crowd raise their hands
to prove they were here before the world was free,
and now they turn their hands to carving
a nation into sunlit chiffons, now they wrestle demons
into the earth, death by drowning, death by arrow,
death by sword, death by edict, death by directive,
death by mercury and arsenic, death by demon air--
beautiful death by ink sluiced off newspapers
into tinctures of anger and confusion, death to all
but the immaculate self, tax-less and finally free--
what a show. The biggest crowd ever.
Voices rise to hail the invention of a new
mathematics, new words blare like bassoons
and charters and decrees to spin it all up
in a giant cocoon so they can give birth
to freedom as dark matter, ink the intoxicant
free from words, free from meaning, free
from anarchist’s slogans, free like machines
with wings, like monkeys with leathern wings
chattering across a cobalt sky. The drunken man
on the bicycle follows his wheels where they
lay tracks of a new language weaving through mud,
a new tongue twisted into dark screens
as a Babel of people speak into their palms
where ghosts have gathered according to the spell:
O let us drink the moon and light our way
with candles and follow a trail of wax
as the wheeled contraption cranks
the drunken man home—all ye all ye home come free.
11.
A Napoleon in motley, a Medici in rags,
a Machiavelli of the people. His wheel razes
crooked roadwork stones—let us number them
so we can re-assemble the puzzle the way some
Khrushchev or Goebbels, some Stalin or Mao
will recognize as history’s inevitability. Let us dream
some deep chemical architecture of a new nation
to fresco over the ashes of memory. Pace the towers
of the Khan, O Senator, prowl the towers of the inebriate
King, O Congressman, pace the broken crenellations
and scout for rumor from seas, pace the battlements
beyond the rising rivers, beyond waters pressing the wall,
cheer the siege with saltless foes, grind the enemy’s
palaces to dust, destroy the narcotic televisions,
burn the veils of silk, strafe the caravans and turn the sand
to glass. Read the flight of crow, the fire’s ash, augury
of tea leaves in the cup, prophesize gold in futures
of arsenic and polonium. Trade alphabets like pilgrims,
cast the Phoenicians and Greeks into a copper pit,
bargain for astrolabes to navigate the bays, climb
the profit sheets on a ladder of ribs cured
from the carcasses of your slaves, piss on the agonies
of the old wars the piss of vodka and gasoline,
hammer failed hope into a facsimile of a horse
in tin and ship it to an antique market, stamp a dull dollar,
florin, or ruble and awaken the muddy river of your America.
Rise again like matin bells flaring over the rooftops and sing
our past to parchment, powder the eggshells, spit on the coffins,
eat breadcrumb and marrow and declare your nation in Cyrillic.
Follow the dopplering of the motorcade, trace the path
of your soused shadow toward an uncertain star
in the middle distance that burns through sleep
against a terracotta dome, against a tower some Cosimo
watches anxiously to execute the hour’s newly minted curse.
12.
If there’s a form inside a thing, like a human
shape inside a rock, then there’s a miracle
of balance inside a drunk on a bicycle
navigating the streets of the brain--
maybe he just cannot lose. Congressmen
leech mutability like phosphorous
into the flickering crowd
almost knocking the king from his seat
atop a contraption of wire and steel
some fool sketched in a notebook
so this huffing dervish could go forth
to raise his flag of money
where the pandemonium of history
refuses to die on a chalk-silhouette street.
We are composed of newspaper, rag, cigarette butts,
emulsifiers, wool, and a gold florin.
Some prince’s man watched a drunkard
on a horse once and invented the cantilevered
arm. That is how we abandon nature for art--
not to praise some god who remains aloof,
but to hail the King, to worship the thing burning
inside him like Dionysius’ ruby bead: our crimson flail.
13.
Grief brings the minstrel to the old city
where corporate towers were built in stone
that only dreamed of plastic and strontium,
where the first corporate engines ate a fuel
of dye and blood and minted nickel reveries--
O lost home between fields and citadel,
O fatal renaissance, fevered dream,
O pool of demons who rise and flood furies
through my mind to drown the child inside,
some poor Lorenzo or Lincoln swept up
by memory’s distortion of time’s waters,
some Roosevelt a duke smiled to scorn
while still holding my slender slats of rib
to peer out at his future: a crowd
weighed down with purses and bags who step
on stilts like herons poised to stab at minnows.
I cycle against the tide, the throng, the groundlings
under the loggia. I ride through all these selves
staring into their hands as they go.
I sing and try to rise above the swirling radionuclides
but falling fail, drown and drop, orphean.
The underworld has many windows
open to the narcotic of widowed night.
The present moment is an ancient place.
It rises in towers above our towns,
above this you, above this me, above the shore
where Pluto fills his digital well to baffle
a revenant . . . . even a drunkard knows the length
of his hand. We ride somnambulant, a trinket
on a mobile’s scale, a clown rowing a Napoleon
hat through a madman’s blueprint of the near future
or recent past, a balancing suspense that cannot last
like wind from the east, as if time had seen its ghost.
Poor Tom. Peace, Smulkin. The violets wither.
14.
Witness: when the drunken man rides his bicycle
through the piazza, we recoil and advance
like mice at the mercy of his whims: now he bumps
the fruit vendor, now he glances off the window
at the bank, now he knocks over the woman
with sacks of groceries—passersby catch the oranges
and apples and bottles but the drunkard he lifts
his hand in triumph: what dexterity, what balance,
what a man! A taxi smashes into the pharmacy
to avoid the wheeling bike, the man on the church
steps flinches as more broadcast groceries arc
toward him in a trajectory of circus colors.
The scene unfolds with logic and necessity,
and however reluctant we may be
to devote ourselves to him, a part of us gives it up
for the randomness of what he’ll do next,
for the careening of the wheels, for the tossed
curse and catcalls as he lifts his legs
into the shape of a nun’s wimple athwart the frame,
balance askew, final catastrophe now certain.
And it is like both the strophe and antistrophe
of old tragedy and the child whose antics
dominate the room. Caution and concern
become the edge of their own cutting blade
as a virtual somersault, like the inebriate tumbling
over cartoon cobblestones in a cartoon fit,
spills pedestrian blood like graffiti against the walls.
15.
On the stage it’s a monkey riding a bicycle,
but in the world beyond the mind, balloons
are bombs, antics and hijinks are carnage
and war, feint and bluff are rebar
and white hoods. On the stage the tyrant is a toy,
in the world, murder. A simple sneer
and a whole people maligned, a gesture
of self-promotion, sleeves shot at the expense
of an entire race, a swerve, a honking of the toy
horn, a clown flares smilingly, the monkey primping,
stoking the furnace of self idolatry, stroking the tiny
member with a grin. Too, the nation’s monkey
mind, barbarous and trivial, flickers
in the imagination of continents, a smirk flashes
over the mirrors of self and the illusions multiply
in the lurid light of the baboons’ crimson asses’ glow.
The audience is gullible, sincere, naïve, trembling,
half in love with the wag. Then the network spills
its headline: Jesus must have been a hater too, love
his lash and whip. Blessed are the righteous,
for they will vanquish the losers. We retreat
to the altar of television and screen, for sex
and bedtime stories in thrall of the monkey
and his coined wilderness. See the cigarette
in the adorable grip of the baby chimp, see
a thousand fires smoldering in the nation’s upholstery.
Each crimson coal bores a hole through eternity
to the underworld of dreams, anorectic
and chemical, drowned in the pupil-blackened
hatches tattooed against the believers’ scored palms.
Violent night, holy night.
16.
Surely we’ve come to the end of something,
the end of the same thing we thought we saw die
when B-52s climbed the whirligigs of jungle
trees and shut their eyes against the napalm,
when drenched sands redeployed the groans
with pit-bulls and the hard-wired genitals
of the enemy were renditioned in old palace walls.
Were we bankrupt all along, those false hopes
we called enlightenment and renaissance
dying all these years from heartworm wheedling
doubt into sawdust however much we wished
to have, along the battlements, the muffled darkness
unfold to reveal some origin or answer, either right
or wrong? Surely we have travelled here
to see some tangle of hope and despair loosened
at a border crossing under shade of a mesquite,
only to find a wounded king fishing in the mud,
a sick queen disguised as a beggar to undo
desire or desire’s obliteration—surely we have
travelled here to find something that will make us
feel whole again, or purposefully broken,
a code switch obscure scribes predicted
on a master stone a dead age scored and read
eons ago that will make us say this is our us:
this is what and what for, this the room,
this the bed, this the door that leads to a door,
this the word that found a home on our tongue
before it died in our ears, before it turned to ash,
this the gorgon face tattooed on the wall
of an inconsequential heart. And now a monkey
riding a scooter on a horse’s back—maybe it’s you,
maybe it’s me who wears an impresario’s top hat,
ringmaster whip in hand to beat down the humanity.
Sleep, Nuncle, sleep. Poor Tom will make him
weep and wail, his horn is dry. They will lay him
in the cold ground, at his heels a stone.
Pansies for thoughts.
17.
A clown serving plums to a voracious queen:
we know enough to know this is how it begins,
crumbs of words sprinkled across the dark
pool that opens inside an ego’s screen. Furies
clamber up ribs, their faces surfacing like fish
taking shapes of desire that never died. And now
they morph and molt, swell and worm,
shed and ming from the atoms of the broken
centuries. This is what the old debris do
in fertile earth: seek and find their way to light,
the tubers half rotten, half green with rot,
ancient hatreds, buried jealousies. The end of peace
begins with war, roots of blood stirring
in new dirt. A monstrous imagination
gestates, disseminates fire and blood,
seeks purchase in the soil of the angry class.
Must all the monsters we slay wear our own faces?
(The child within slew me with just this sword
to cut the old man’s ravings: rosemary, rue).
18.
We need a Medusa at this end of things,
a head of hair composed of snakes.
We need to cut out a heart and eat it
in the marketplace of this America,
we need to hold up Perseus’ head
as the emblem of the new gorgon
the colonizer of minds, weaver of illusions--
O Child: decipher the aged stains
we read as prophecy growing up
from age’s dregs in childhood’s cup.
19.
America grows old. Mesmerized, scripted
on a screen, we watch the man on the bicycle
careen in antic shapes of a clown, a wind-up
toy or grainy cartoon with a wobbly music
of Betty-Boop or Popeye, saint or Madonna
in a black and white film or school-kid doodles
in a tablet turned flip-book—look at the man
who holds his brain like a flute of rare vintage
precarious over the cobblestones, look at his dog,
Little John, race ahead in a dream of rut
through the ancient arcades.
Look at the pantomime desire apes
aping desire, a monkey on a tin horse,
calavera on a cattail reed:
Step up right this way!—watch a man
turn into a spume of dust, watch a nation
crumble into a spatter of zinc and neurotoxins.
Behold the drunken man on the bicycle
veering over the flagstones of history,
smashing monuments like stale cookies
groping the perfumed bodies pressed
against a wall. . . . listen to the laughter
of the crowd . . . . there’s a mouth on a drunken
bicycle floating on a blue ocean,
a voice whose wheels ride on currents
from his own lungs, the thermals his voice
amplifies in his cave and in the world
rising now as, airborne, he teeters toward
you and toward me, toward the opiate
oblivion of a trinket vendor’s stall.
20.
Our faces are trinkets in a vendor’s stall,
ears are nests a crow’s lust for glitter
has feathered with silver.
The King colonizes the weak places.
A fontanel erodes under weather
of a radio voice. A god worms
the apple where the vulnerable
flesh of fruit has built its private
sweetness. The whine of a blood angel
tells history how it must unfold,
how flesh will become juice,
how the self will be deployed
in wars as the host cheers for madness,
as the nation thrills to be a toy
in the hands of a drunken man,
a bauble to juggle, words as toys
in the teeth of the drunken man,
whose medieval locomotions assemble
civic order of catapult and wagon.
Not me, not you, but hailed
as the only purity,
the one wild card,
infused with his own blood,
flush with chemicals and courage.
American, the original word,
the only beginning,
the only brave word.
21.
Hog in sloth,
fox in stealth,
dog in madness.
Come, unbutton here.
Maybe it was only
a small coin,
to have been so easily
given away,
our America.
We must wear
our rue
with a difference,
savor
the world’s eating.
22.
Somewhere beyond the reach
of nation we remember voices
outside the window
beyond the hedge,
maybe you, maybe me,
sunlight and headlights
shifting across a wall,
plastic men in cinderblock
puddles, all bright as colors:
cars, flavors, sounds.
Somewhere beyond
the reach of nation you and I
remember the animal
building its nest in the shadow
of a well where
a traveler stops for water.
Somewhere beyond
the wrenching
and the howls,
drink, Traveler,
and be confused again.
23.
A canvas tent folds into steel and air
and Monkey sleeps on the neck
of a horse. Baboon murmurs
against the solar plexus
of the contortionist.
The world fills with smoke
and lavender.
Pilgrims begin a road
paralytics and lepers limped
in darkness.
The kilns forge gorgon masks.
Fragments. Sparks.
Houses of paper shift in wind.
Dan Butterworth is professor of writing and literature at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. He grew up in Seattle and earned MA and PhD degrees at the University of North Carolina. His writing has appeared in many journals, including Cream City Review, The Wisconsin Review, The Louisville Review, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Plainsong, The Seattle Review, Willow Springs, and other journals. His books include Waiting for Rain: A Farmer’s Story (nonfiction, Algonquin), The Radium Watch Dial Painters (poetry, Lost Horse Press; finalist for the Washington State Book Award) and The Clouds of Lucca (poetry, Lost Horse Press).