"Good,"
                says the author at our building door,
        "that there are no fires in Brooklyn."

But he is blind at 8:00,
and too easily persuaded by the dole of feminists
        skinned by gabbling coins,

        as good a donation  as a hunger artist could hope for.

His only subjects of choice are
dopamine
        and the sexual affections of male ballet dancers;
        but he has never broached them in the same conversation.

                This is why. This is why,
        when we hear him talking about fire,

we are all thrown from the memory
of our standard/gather-round/assumed positions,

and why we all
        flutter
        to find vacant plots on the cement around him,

        and whip out our lighters and dear cigarettes:

agile, self-mangling gunslingers,
we have been prepared for this pleasant novelty
                                                                —all day.