My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

How about strain, does it mean
a severe trying or wearing pressure or
effect (such as a strain of hard work),
or a passage, as in piece of music?
Does Mercury refer to a brand of oil?
In the lines
shards of bucolic pastry anchored
against cactus cabinets, Nantucket buckets
could we take it as-pieces of pies
or tarts are placed in buckets (which
are made of wood from Nantucket)
anchored against cabinets (small
rooms or furniture?) with cactus?
What is nutj/ack?
A TEST OF POETRY 53
I suppose the caucus of caucasians
refers to the white people's meeting
of a political party to nominate candidates.
But who is Uncle Hodgepodge?
And what does familiar freight
to the returning antelope mean?
You write, the walls are our floors.
How can the walls be floors if the floors
refer to the part of the room which forms
its enclosing surface and upon which one
walks? In and the floors, like balls,
repel all falls-does balls refer to
nonsense or to any ball like a basket ball
or to guys? Or to a social assembly for
dancing? Falls means to descend
from a higher to a lower
or to drop down wounded or dead?
But what is the so-called overall
mesh?
Is the garbage heap the garbage heap
in the ordinary sense? Why does
garbage heap exchange for so-called
overall mesh? Since a faker is
one who fakes, how can
arbitrary reduce to faker?