--- M I C H A E L   M A G E E

	for Matt Hart & Chris Stroffolino

We have a firm committment to Europe.
We are part of Europe. -- Dan Quayle

You'd like to think that the march
from cricket to rounders to baseball was
linear, and representative of some
transcendental tendency toward democracy, --
"the basic symbolic agency through which the
British colonials transformed themselves into..."
but, in fact, it is absolutely	true!

for, if playing pinochle w/ Pinochet is any
indication we're four cards short of a
full deck and counting the lousy meld into
yesterday's "game of chess," well, there's your
Middleton, & there's your three Websters, none
of whom can alchemize their slumming into something
less than condescension: precedent is the
elegant festschrift for the form-amorous whip

(then, in the course of humorous events, some
white folks don red face to throw em
tea-in-harbor party; theater having an
invisible hand of its own, liberty was
rarely on their side thereafter, "intolerable
acts" of war looking for Philip's head inherited by suits 
clasping SAMUEL ADAMS ä in your local pub on their
mother's side, their wives making "minute men" jokes)

...in the "fireside cookbook of cryptology" were
all the old stories, -- how we bounced and
played along the surface like a bandlength
of wavy gypsies bound for a joust-n-mount party
in the ionosphere.  What happened then
is a matter of some debate, or a mutter
that summed a bet, a bet about matters of meter, de-
pending on who you talk to,  and when...

this was the purpose and we took it
with nothing to offer you but our old
Blood Sweat & Tears albums we engaged a
man or woman known as "performance" to
a man or woman called "Walks-With-Lack-Of-Sheet-Music,"
referring to it as a pilot, or the trailer for a
pilot.  You saw London, you saw France, you
saw Walks-With-Lack-Of-Sheet-Music's underpants, on
which were written the laws of Kings, Dukes, et al, and
their "deffersits," -- a tabula rasa for
girls without curls and boys with lost dolphins:

the only time "of" would be used was in
phrases such as "the tennisball of my eggplant."
No matter how many times it happened,
having ones nerves extracted from dermis, epidermis,
would be really unnerving.  There's more than one
way to skin a cat and all of them would be illegal.
These laws were like family friends to us.

Or else, only address reversal, -- somnabulist
walks across Atlantic, up the winding stairs
of the nearest Victorian and, screaming, "Grandpa!"
holds a pistol to Dr. Arbuthnot demanding his
confession.  Compulsory reps with Eddie's pal
in a faux-ancestral comport, the hot rod's
racing stripes and flames painted on the refrigerator
box of revolting behavior.  Attack word-circled wagons;
ramble-tack, flank speed, past his storied flank;
pass traffic in the middle; rake the language.