my education: a book of dreams

When you unsaid the day and split the hour

I thought, What do seconds do after hours?

And I thought, Minutes are here to go.

So told Edgar Allan Poe

In a brief time before the dead eons

blamed the live months for nothing and everything

But nobody and nothing could heal the split

as time blubbered like severed coral

And there was no time left to mend

the wounds of punctured time spilling

into the void of used razor blades in

the heart of bellowing Texas 

For theirs is not an ill for mending

Better take it to the waves that

soothe the Band-Aids of rainy afternoons

And consummate the spray paint's despairing

flares across the tilted ponds of

Despond and mercurial pollutions

For there is no balm in suburbia

for the lost bougainvillea's purple lament

For it was after all present and pre-

written eons ago with broken stone hoe

bowed by the weight of centuries he stands

and offers to you his pre-callused

hands that mar the bubble gum's

affreuse, frivolity, with false teeth

in a screaming skull, molten lead

in the screaming ear and brittle

nuance of greasy fear. It is not

too late to turn the page.

from My Education: A Book of Dreams

by William S. Burroughs