David Kirby

I began to eat that distance:

with my toe, I pulled the plug 

and the water drained out of the tub

and me with it, into the Great Basin

of the Paris sewer where centipedes

 

grew, fifteen feet in length, 

and time came to me and I to it.

First Hamlet wrote a dozen or sixteen

lines which he added to The Mousetrap

(actually The Murder of Gonzago) so that 

 

the Player Queen said: "A second time

I kill my husband dead / When secondd

husband kisses me in bed." The result?

Nothing! In London, Agatha Christie

snows in a hotelful of guests in her

 

version of The Mousetrap and has 

the detective arrive by skis to announce

a killer is on his way. Result? Nothing

again! At the first Ann Arbor Blues

Festival, Howlin' Wolf's drummer

 

begins to play "train time" as 

the Wolf plays whistles on his mouth harp

and shouts "a-whoo!," and then 

the people hear it: a real train in

the distance that the musicians heard

 

before they did and that is now an

instrument in the band, speeding

just behind the stage and shaking

the ground for hundreds of yards.

"This is where the soul of man

 

never dies," says Sam Phillips

of Chess Records, and the people

know it's true. Holy moly,

say the people! I say what is moly,

and why is it holy. 

 

We regret that at the 1:45 mark, the Poematic locked up, depriving David of that remaining time. We apologize to Mr. Kirby and our readers [Ed.].

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