John Ashbery

.Trust me. The world is run on a shoestring They have no time to return the calls in hell And pay dearly for those wasted minutes. Somewhere In the future it will filter down through all the proceedings

The medieval town, with frieze Of boy scouts from Nagoya? The snow ?That came when we wanted it to snow Beautiful images? Trying to avoid

I really thought that drinking here would Start a new chain, that the soft storms Would abate, and the horror stories, the ,Noises men make to frighten themselves

The first of the undecoded messages read: "Popeye sits ,in thunder ,Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment ".From livid curtain's hue, a tangram emerges: a country

,The shadow of the Venetian blind on the painted wall ,Shadows of the snake-plant and cacti, the plaster animals Focus the tragic melancholy of the bright stare .Into nowhere, a hole like the black holes in space

.You can’t say it that way any more Bothered about beauty you have to ,Come out into the open, into a clearing And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you