suzie philippot
More tell: Last words for Dutch Schulz Flegenheimer
the hidden rhymes of click
and dipping ammonia.
Aging afternoon, colder evening, a green shape
to enter into hallway here, to take the flight
of stairs up to this room
down a corridor of echoing concrete.
The light
in vested interest in the pooling
fills every iron or the snow set of flickers
and the tap in the bathroom sink
a metal shaft of stillness
resonating on the floor.
Beyond the melee of the final reverberation
the fate tell the last words
the noise of machines the now in between the delirious
sets of gasps and the
obscured details of the end in the john.
A record:
“Oh stop it, stop it; eh, oh, oh. Sure, sure, mama:
Whose number is that in your pocket book,
Oh – please, please. Reserve decision.
Oh, oh, dog biscuits and when he is happy he doesn’t get happy
he was a cowboy in one of the seven days a week fight
It is from the factory. Sure, that is a bad.
I don’t want harmony. I want harmony.
It is no use to stage a riot. The sidewalk was in trouble
and the bears were in trouble
and I broke it up. Please put me in that room.
Oh, sir, get the doll a roofing.”
the electric clip of the record play and then:
“Open this up and break it so I can touch you.”
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Watch what a railroad makes
A walk home each day to avenue J, with its unfinished front steps (the taxes)
and the trees out back (grafted). We added
the perfect mud for imaginary slave drivers, and assembly line pies.
Near that was the window for sneaking, and back door for
opening quietly, and the place where the snow grew
so thick that it took three hours to find a proposal in (it was not wanted).
Every visit we were afraid to go into the basement
or the room with more than twenty framed faces on the wall
both places had too many eyes staring that might say,
“Youngest, you are not going to live up to the standards of those who
previously occupied that pink high chair.” And then we’d take
two steps at a time to get away from the smell of cellar.
To Baba’s bosom which is softer than most other morning things and the milk
that pours out of the cow-shaped container is smoother for your
cream of wheat and blueberry pancakes. (We all have to share the shower.)
Yellow light, morning, noon, and somehow, night. The TV, a dark portal to space,
was never on. Besides these things, there were a couple dogs before, apparently,
but they died long before me, and Dido just a few months after.
My first plane ride (to the centre of the plains, of course) first to say
hello then to say good bye.
Now there are only budgies in the living room, and always family on couches.
But this was before the moves, and the house that we pilgrims drove to
remains now only on two things: a grave stone and
the apartment wall above the dwindling homemaker’s dishes
that are never washed anymore. (She is forgetting, so am I.)