Spectrum Auction

by Franklin Bruno

As the camel of paternalism
edges his nose inside the tent,
I sit in a newsprint suit
writing on my pants.
An errata slip floats out
of a cereal box, a prize
(temporary tattoo or plastic
bead-in-hole game) drops
from the catalogue raisonnÈ
of works on paper, graphite in
a weak solution of colloidal
sustenance. Pages of two
bound volumes interwoven
via tabled riffle shuffle
sans cascade. Boyís Book
of Things to Learn and Do, say,
and Streets for People.
Modulo addition tables
a motion, antes up, casts
out nines, hides the winning
slip behind the punchboards.
Enrich Your Word
Power into a hunching cairn
of chalk, but donít flake
on us. Reference works
on a shelf a stoolstep
lower than erotica and
the albums of piercings,
please ask for assistance.
Reference works on
stains of all kinds:
splotches and blots and smearsó
a fast-acting paste
formed from a binding
agent and a fine sweet ash
of confectionerís sugar.
Fill my pockets with illiberal
notions, toenail
of a golem poking through
the finely encrypted material.
My will, known
but occluded. Flight of stairs
wide enough to walk
up at a diagonal,
an ìIî in italics acting
as slash, glassed-
in passage between terms
or terminals, compressed
into a wave and ducted
at broadcast frequencies.
Adjust my imagination,
runniní away with me,
the way a radio receives
a station, how cigarettes
function as punctuation:
first as exclamation points,
later as commas, lastly
as ellipses.


Franklin Bruno is a native of Southern California, currently working on his
Ph.D. in philosophy at UCLA. E-mail: bruno@humnet.ucla.edu