Free Flow Chart: A Poem by John Ashbery

rolling over and over like a marble
    that can never stop rolling and here we are, still doing it only advised of our interlocutor’s
    growing lack of patience, and permanently eager for the end of the run,
    dog bite dog, it doesn’t so much say it on the advertisement as
    what do you think, where do you come from; more doses of advice
    from shaggy-haired strangers.
    And all lock themselves in at night,
    desperately vamping where a half-turn to see who’s behind in that tree might
    have been deemed more appropriate, if equally ineffective. What brio in your chat, how
    do you keep going next time?
    And I told him for half a dime I’d quit and screw
    you too, only that’s not done, the very
    pillars of our civilization would crumble and Osiris would again have to punish
    the unwary who danced jigs in our shadow, we the keepers of the trust who have to
    somehow find the missing key that at this moment is within the grasp of a leper
    who plays with it, not knowing.
    And flies still tax us with their lessons: when will we give up? In order to land on that shred
    of inhospitable strand one is forced to jettison certain
    much-beloved possessions, including, I’m afraid, that key. O if only one belonged to something,
    life would be harder perhaps but we’d have the strength to go along with whatever they
    wanted us to say and we’d have rivalry at the end, sure, but cunning as well in the abstract
    clockface of accusations from the various points of the compass, and who knows, if one got
    away, how much sicker the other would get? Perhaps not much. Perhaps if you had
    a little compassion in your yard things would grow staler and the calm
    of the original compact wouldn’t capsize it, leading to distant benefits and premises.
    I told you his name was Max you were the one who thought otherwise and well
    it’s just as well as the gunwale unkisses faster the tires nailed to the dock
    of departure and all our plans and ammo were scuttled, at the threshold
    of this adamantine resort where two
    can lie but no more, reprisals splash into the night. It must surely have come
    from over there, those dried grasses. More power to them, for what must never
    seem to have taken place on an afternoon once. As we kindle interest in that old past, what
    astonishing trills one hears, what blistering swamp flowers thrust open; furry
    sea-creatures invade the royal compound and next week the clock will strike
    exactly at twelve o’clock, you’ll be free of a long-tendered obligation.
    Since then I’ve been sleeping better too, but your shoes aren’t getting fed properly, there are
    spots on whatever one is called to drink, and curse it, no
    water in the watering-trough. Yes but the horse said he didn’t want any, besides
    his harness is torn and angry,
    a proverb for the industrious. Oh we’ve known a long time how much her
    trail was costing her and others and now it’s time for definitive common knowledge, only
    nothing is so sure anymore it wants to be reminded. Maybe it never knew at all. Maybe
    we deduced it out of guilt, and now it’s we on the run, my goodness how the unrolling
    scenery veers past. Was it even we
    who were meant to start on this race? Might it have been for the others, all for them,
    and so one is let off lightly, or so it seems, with a reprimand
    and a startling dream? I told someone at the start of this
    I wouldn’t play faster than my nearest neighbor. Now look
    what’s become of him. I wouldn’t want to end up at a finish line unwashed
    and looking like that. I go. I come later. You all land at the bottom of a crowded funnel
    and so whatever joke is cracked coincides with your defense. Not everyone was made to wear
    what we choose to wear. The colors, rinsed, insistent, return; the pink is for you,
    not just to wash and wish desperately into something else that in any case
    was probably never meant to be understood, and it smiles, and salvages
    what little it can from the eternal barren beginning of March.