Improv: Bond's "Elegy"

This is a Mad Libs version of "Elegy." In the words of my grandfather, I done rurnt it.

Once I swore dying was the same light
from haste as sugar from peaches, the same
that plucked a pigeon's wing at night, a rostrum
I'd never clutch completely, I'd never hammer.

You know the feeling, I'm sure: the exhaust
that tends the refrain inside it, that keeps it overheard.

But if nerves are stemmed to a world in panic,
don't nerves too catch the flu. I want to believe

there is more truth in kennels of shins
than shins in any kennel that's truthful. But then

who could lose oneself inside a thigh
that never dies. One day our scaling turns

to calibrate the way a parable turns to its
remaining own womb. Is obstruction any less
the phantom, any less the preacher who compels
himself in the one he prays he won't

survive. One day a parable's elegy turns back
to say, don't I know you.

Improv: Bond's "Death Mask"

The hymnist irons his socks at night and calls me up,
tells me it's the end of the world, that I should move underground.
Last Sunday, during service, he flirted with Mrs. Dander
by the organ's pipes. I thought I saw him float up with the reeded air.
The hymnist has composed something not new but just new
enough, newer than the old and rugged and good and old;
he taps it out on the upright, a spatter of curious birds. I visit
with him in the fellowship hall, we clamber about
past the trays of micowaved, canned, corn creamed anythings,
he sweats through his suit, wipes down his face
with a used handkerchief--a theft--says I should take a good hard
look at which direction the grass grows, does it sprout up or lean,
should we follow and mask ourselves in a chorus, a verse,
an aria's fluttered peroration, in the signature the ground
forges across our faces' dotted lines.

Improv: Bond's "Homage to the Ear"

By the dim lamp in the corner, we stand witness to the ear without a body, something out of Blue Velvet or your father's formaldehyde cache. There's nothing but silence here. I think about your father and his ataxia. The way he holds his chest to the wall below that piece of Penley kitsch, like the way you examine the ear. Where did it come from? Who left it. It cries. We must keep it, hush it, whisper in sibilance, we will be happy I swear.

Improv: Bond's "Rock"

"Woody"
You who straps those cliched surfboards atop your skull, whose lost smoke echoes the loss of childhood, gum on the sole. You have no sense of wonder. And your name--chrissakes--an incantation unspoken here, in this crowd especially, who wears solid colors and eat bland, saltless foods. Okay, Surfin' USA, strap it on, rip it off, treetops, the swill of a wave like your spit in the toilet.

Improv: Bond's "A Diet of Angels"

So little to go on, the light heave of the zipper,
a disposition of flightless birds never so still,
sunken. She took me down the glazed

hill one morning, fumbling through sunflower
fields--a god's view. Somewhere is a word
between those words we throw like rocks

welling out of the hard ground. I fit
your glasses over the sunken hazel
and tell you we're visiting islands, any islands.

Improv: Bond's "Abyss of Birds"

What it must be to watch the callouses
fall from your fingertips. Drying dishes
in the key of C, keeping time with the waitresses's
tom, falling into your own monuments
or an angel's sword. It's a quartet you've
recorded years ago nobody's heard
that squeaks, squirms from the speakers
before you. Cerulean guitars
and coded words you can't even make
out now beckon to you like the angel
Gabriel--the mouthpiece of God.
Did he tell Lot's daughters to sleep
with him in that? Did he commission
the arson we committed that night
in your bedroom.

Improv: Bond "Body and Soul"

Where to find a good cup of coffee in the morning dark
where those old friends cook up little brown sausages
for their own sake, leaving you a stranger to the
ways the holes get it; the holes burrow between you
and the nameless hands before you and the place
you want to call home. Fall on your knees and tell
her you love her like a jazz drummer loves
a fake-book, without loving the mouthpiece,
emphesymic. The bridge and cough cling
to the oral roof like shingles. We are the rain.