Benjamin Friedlander
Period Piece
for Dan Davidson
Construction turns back on itself.
Dogs have to be whipped.
Barrett Watten
A sentence is an imagined
master piece.
A sentence is an imagined frontispiece.
Gertrude Stein
I
In God We Trust
inscribed on the obverse of the world:
Coprophiliac eats shit.
II
Opaque thinking
written in windows:
Everything we say turns into mush.
III
The well of loneliness
swallows a bad penny: Pollyanna
flunks her polygraph.
IV
Traffic cop blows whistle blower:
Unelectable elite
erased from contention.
V
Poets are the acknowledged
ambassadors of nothing:
Run, Spot, Run.
VI
A violent tautology
settles nothing: Mind poured out
through a funnel of dust.
VII
God is dead:
Dangling overhead,
bodies bunched like grapes.
VIII
Dogs chew paper
in suburban idyll:
The ideal reader bends to tie her shoe.
IX
Never to fuck my own ass,
or kiss the back of my head: Fingernail
drags arbitrary sign down chalk board.
X
Hope sinks eternal:
Black man with shovel
trudges silently through snow.
XI
Determined as a blunt pencil
leaving creases in a pad:
Walk-on walks off, stage left.
XII
Illegitimi non carborundum
engraved on a three dollar bill:
Poetry as social engineering.
XIII
Metaphors
we live on: A happy Midas
addled by the brightness of her gift.
XIV
My occupation—snail;
my progress—slow:
God helps those who help themselves.
XV
The slur is our magnetic north:
In a could-have-been world
all blows are bare-knuckled.
XVI
Fade, accomplice:
Puppet pulls string,
yanking down a president.
XVII
They dream
only of Canada: Jolly Green Giant
wends his way through Viet Nam.
XVIII
A tinker toy world
built in a frenzy by a child god:
Your tip is in the mail.
XIX
Ludite
spurns the advance of sex machine:
I, Sade, saw, I testify.
XX
Quietism rises up
and yawns the deeper answer:
Things to do on Christopher Street.
XXI
When the cat’s away,
the mice play hardball:
Lock and load.
XXII
Solution clears
a nasal passage:
Pinch a loaf.
XXIII
The dark allotted crystals tip
the balance of the scale:
Paradise without method equals TB.
XXIV
He shakes a light
torn from a book of matches:
Prof. Peabody lectures Sherman on war.
XXV
Spoonfed Rorschach,
make me sick: Beach Boy sings
‘‘Be True to Your School.’’
XXVI
In a company town
the charges stick: These foolish things
remind me of you.
XXVII
Drinker, teacher,
sodomist, mole: Medicinal hatred,
legal in all fifty states.
XXVIII
In a class war,
poetry is the shrapnel:
‘‘Fire in the hole!’’
XXIX
Fair weather friends
drown in the echo:
P-p-pardon my French.
XXX
Vanishing cab
hacks its way through traffic:
Eco-femme, meet Übermensch.
XXXI
Vermin pushing forty
gnaw the innards of the system:
Ratman forever.
XXXII
Garbage men
produce alienated labor:
Mom, if you’re there, pick up the phone.
XXXIII
Mind like an old eraser
casually smearing the lead:
Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.
XXXIV
Marginality
out-performs the market:
One toke over the line.
XXXV
Who lately flipped
the pages of Time: Cow,
jump over the moon.
XXXVI
Bulletproof Lincoln circles the block:
Kinged across red square
in a game of global checkers.
XXXVII
Benefits slip away,
like strips of rubber from a semi wheel:
Letter to White House in dot matrix.
XXVIII
Sentence
takes shape as alibi: Ennui
is a client state of doom.
XXXIX
If Casper the Friendly Ghost
were Gertrude Stein the Jewess:
The Occurrence of ’Chune.
XL
Puffing on a periscope
to see which way the wind blows:
Man bites dog.
XLI
‘‘I yam what I yam,’’
shrieks Popeye:
Well blow me down.
XLII
Pooped on the deck
of not yet: Playing a nose flute
and pulling out the stops.
XLIII
The crack in a pipe
splits the limits of free speech:
A is for Anglophone.
XLIV
Ideology
is the devil’s work station:
There’s no place like home.
XLV
A pencil sharpener groans,
belaboring the point: Speaking cure
leaves hymen intact.
XLVI
An errant device from the future
disguised as a radio, called the alphabet:
I’ll be back.
XLVII
Melancholy installed,
subject to fit: My heart ticks
and a drowsy member aches.
XLVIII
Libido sleeps,
fouling the air and pummeling a book:
Take me to your bladder.
XLIX
The splat of a rat
whisked from a balcony: Therapy
as petting zoo.
L
Wormy apple
demonstrates gravity:
The pure product (America) goes crazy.