Decoy

        We hold these truths to be self-evident:
	That ostracism, both political and moral, has
	Its place in the twentieth-century scheme of things;
	That urban chaos is the problem we have been seeing into and seeing into,
	For the factory, deadpanned by its very existence into a
	Descending code of values, has moved right across the road from total financial upheaval
	And caught regression head-on.  The descending scale does not imply
	A corresponding deterioration of moral values, punctuated
	By acts of corporate vandalism every five years,
	Like a bunch of violets pinned to a dress, that knows and ignores its own standing.
	There is every reason to rejoice with those self-styled prophets of commercial disaster, those harbingers of gloom,
	Over the imminent lateness of the denouement that, advancing slowly, never arrives,
	 
        At the same time keeping the door open to a tongue-and-cheek attitude on the part of the perpetrators,
	The men who sit down to their vast desks on Monday to begin planning the week’s notations, jotting memoranda that take
	Invisible form in the air, like flocks of sparrows
	Above the city pavements, turning and wheeling aimlessly
	But on the average directed by discernible motives.
	 
        To sum up: We are fond of plotting itineraries
	And our pyramiding memories, alert as dandelion fuzz, dart from one pretext to the next
	Seeking in occasions new sources of memories, for memory is profit
	Until the day it spreads out all its accumulation, delta-like, on the plain
	For that day no good can come of remembering, and the anomalies cancel each other out.
	But until then foreshortened memories will keep us going, alive, one to the other.
	 
        There was never any excuse for this and perhaps there need be none,
	For kicking out into the morning, on the wide bed,
	Waking far apart on the bed, the two of them:
	Husband and wife
	Man and wife