in memory of Gene Van Troyer

today his internal suburbia is fetched with black rain

and wild hanging gardens frosted by albino crows

today her voice seems to calve to hundreds

its order carrying an arbitrary valence

today they cling to romantic artifice

their destiny as surgeons of the what-was

tomorrow they will map shattered portraits

and listen for the thoughts of their lost

mirror-images, scheduled to announce

their own identities in place of the real

meanwhile, a periphery of giant funnels

is moaning jazzoid into the night sky

there are streets that wind cycloid into

dead suns, scattered word-like upon light's whiteness

today there are windows that return the stares

of all witnesses to the crimes of the crystallizing eye