PRACTICE ROOMS
Music keeps me going. It drives me
up to the sour wax rooms on the sly.
The rooms jangle their collections
of missed notes. I
and my black master: an old relationship,
an old gamble on the long dice.
My fingers never forget; fingers
conduct their own wars.
Set them off and they
annihilate the enemy. They
stamp out fires, they step from
Vienna to Warsaw in one stride.
They are timeless. They tick
off their own minutes
and the spaces
in
between. And the
spaces
in
between are filled with
fresh
limes.
And I am playing them.
I am playing them! The notes are
on wheels. They gather speed.
Vendor! Vendor!
I pedal my huge tricycle filled
with fruits and earthquakes. Their tremors
radiate through the spaces where
the fresh juice runs down my chin.
I pump. I pump. The moth
is
shaken from the felts of
his
banquet.
Wasps scatter pamphlets of
wings
over the trenches. The worm
sings
in the hall of the apple.
