Reconstituted from selected chunks of John Ashbery’s Flow Chart

                                      “… the top

of the volcano has been successfully glued back on, and who is to say we

aren’t invited?” — Flow Chart, p. 167
1.

The incubus awoke from a long, refreshing sleep.

I suppose it does congeal slowly. And the river

threaded its way as best it could, neither conscious

nor uncaring, awash with sentiments in which

the Almighty once saw Himself,

and wept.

                          Quick—the medication.

And while the fire-mind tries out its images on us

at some charm school in hell, and we can’t avoid

our reflection in these, come speak with me behind

the screen. I’ve been at this stand for years,

a thread of breath: that’s all

almost magical now, almost beyond belief. Just so,

some argue, nothing further remains to be done except

the higher echelons where the view is distant.

Not that I think for a moment …
2.

Here a man carries bags, I ask you. Ask, rather, why the clock

slows down. Smell it yourself he said my gosh. A dream from nowhere

mumbling the litany, unaware that the parallel daintiness

of the lives of the rich mentioned in the Bible

worked, like fish in an ocean

whose bottom is dotted. Now both of us were attracted.

Tomorrow beckoned, and today would soon be then.

                                                                                                        Hours,

years later, we were divided up among several participants,

and all that mythology of broken tracks, who make up

the electorate? Each day the ball was in its court. “You’re a grown

man now, but must sit in a tub, on a comfortable income and a few

puddles of camel-stale, jotting down seemingly unrelated

random characteristics.” Leave me here,

if that’s going to help. Always on the rim of some fleshpot,

if he is willing to exchange me for a hostage.
3.

In the real world

one is always setting out from, having in the meantime forgotten

this battle of stupid titans, things keep arriving from the florist’s.

“And I in greater depths than he,” I suppose, know enough

not to insist, to keep sifting a mountain of detritus

like a shuttle. Something else, it says here,

will break fruitfully into oblivion. Another time I was just sitting,

universally misconstrued

                                                       in one’s lap, like a sandwich.

The ads didn’t tell you this. You see it is part of your plan,

to realise that sex has very little to do with any of it,

what’s coming, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have to like it.

I am prepared now for the drone that submerges

and always turns out to be rather nice.

We must be patient if we are to live that far, deposited

over there, not out of sight.
4.

I wanted to cry back at her: “Yes!

I feel their aura, Mother,

it shall fall into our hands and seem what

         disingenuous? Maybe

only a small, other way of living

as one. And when a shining thing approaches,

symmetry is death. Try sleeping on it. And then

we’d have a nice lumbering, tumbrel-like

progress across edifices.

                                                    Any day now you must

start something in the sky. And we’re supposed to get on

with the logic these lines always left space for,

the grotty little amusement park one is

horrified at the prospect

of being immured in: mud and cosmetics.

Different forms of address. This stable or retiring room

or whatever you want to call it. You can feel it when the lake is up:

he’s ready to talk business. Yet one’s ego, for a time at least,

must be drugged or convinced with seabirds’ feathers,

and a smart-looking interior. Meanwhile I have

received your postcard. It likes me the way I am,

baling others of us together like straw, for the speed

of light is far away, and whatever is not glue

may be pressed into service as such.”

A kettle boiled happily.