El candado cansado

       Encúrvase el dedo y ya tienes el espacio....

                                             Álvaro Urtecho

1.

They are strangling themselves

with strange love's black hands

to the vast amusement of a third man

in a third land with a third eye

and three ugly feet.

Who has a clue? Who has the key? They do.

It is in their right back pocket.

Both of them rocket for it. Both hands struggle.

And the band plays on.

2.

What is the space between two songs?

Does nothing have its reasons,

like all other reasons invented

after the fact?

Does the size of vacuity matter?

Does it have its vicinities and seasons and changes of face,

like the moon?

To half a glass eye it adds a crescent

and becomes gibbous, growing slowly

to eclipse.

Like a clipper ship around the horn

a new world is born freighting frost

to San Francisco and back in long round days

at sea.

Both of them rocket for it. Both hands struggle.

And the band plays on.

3.

Tell me, good people,

who is your creator but the devil,

whom you yourself invented and treasured

with all the secret pleasures of a sleeping

secret Egyptian,

whose long whiles lay stock still along the Nile

for four thousand years,

with ears like the jackal

and a nose like the three noses

of the platypus who smells

electromagnetism.

Fickle she was this river,

this shoelace through mountain waste,

fickle and fish-tasting but trickable

by immobile Pharaonic bluff.

Which while was that?

Which Nile—white or blue?

Both of them rocket for it. Both hands struggle.

And the band plays on.

4.

Your chaos

written in blood

is nothing new or huge

screwed tightly on the Canopic jar

of putative new anatomy and knowledge.

You are not the river.

You are not the barge.

You are not the driver.

You are not the sea—neither of you,

nor even the universal crocodile

shitting your tripes into the muddy flow

of rising brown water in flood.

You are the ersatz & exchangeable ant,

red and black, picayune and huge,

whose phases are dunce cap and corner,

honed and wired and mass-producing

nosegays distinct and fungible

on a bed of invisible roses.

Come the locust.

Come the groundhog.

Come the pubic lobster.

Come the bullfrog.

Come the giraffe of sunset.

Come lunatic laughter in silhouette.

Both of them rocket for it. Both hands struggle.

And the band plays on.

5.

The third ant and real.

The third authentic bee.

The third wolf and the third feral dog.

The third bear. The third hare. The third cat.

The third termite & the third acacia tree.

The beating of the Book of the Dead

door to door, floor to floor,

evangelizing islands and isthmuses,

sanitizing, harmonizing, simonizing

twilight into one more false dawn.

Let loose all your death.

Let loose all dolor.

Let loose the dull colors of your last curse

and shake the newborn earth

into morbidity.

No one will remember you.

No one will know your name.

No one will know you were here or there

for a year or a million or a day.

No one will resurrect you.

No one will reconstruct you.

You do not matter.

And as you pass hand in hand

through two performances in platinum

at the same and different time,

and the goose is cooked,

the band plays on.

E. A. Costa 4 December, 2014 Granada, Nicaragua