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Breaker, trick rider, picador, and the heavyweight ring’s fastest jockey, Ali has made ring time canter and canter, bow, leap over giant bushes, and move so much in his own terms that time became mutual with his grace, Truly the Professor of Boxing, he elasticized his profession, made daring and cunning and mystery part of the craft. Did we ever wonder as much during anybody else’s fights what the champ was thinking?

I don't trust nobody

             but the land I said

I don't mean

present company

of course

you understand the grasses

hear me too always

present the grasses

confident grasses polite

command to shhhhh

shhh listen

And we divorced in the survives            and O

It was a comedy            and first you ever slept with me

And marry me and marry me and O

How fat I used to be

“What do I want you to do? You really want to know? I’ll tell you. Just look me in the eye and tell me one thing. Just do it. Tell me whether you and Cynthia have made love. Tell me. Go on.”

“The answer is no.”

“You swear?”

“I swear.”

“I believe you,” she said quietly, and for a moment Richard thought it was over until she turned around and screamed at him, “THEN WHY DON’T YOU MAKE LOVE WITH ME?”

A friend asks, “What are you waiting for?

The straw that breaks the camel’s back?”

Maybe I am the straw.

Maybe I am hay. I made a list of rhyming words:

Bray, flay, array.

They all seemed to relate to farms, decaying things,

gray days, dismay.

I am recently reckless about making a display

of my unhappiness. Perhaps you may survey it.

Perhaps I may stray from it, go to the wrong home

by accident and say, “Oh! Here already?”

You know I’m fraying and just watch it.

You don’t even try to braid me together.

When the future spoke—as it did every day now—it spoke through jukeboxes. In the paradise of affluence Dionne Warwick was always signing a Burt Bacharach song, as a Greek island came into view at starboard. The stars—movie actresses, pop singers, grizzled dissipated novelists, intellectual fashion designers—got hilariously drunk in ship’s bars, alternately fell half-naked down casino steps or announced their intention of filming the work of Genet or Ouspensky. The planet was their plaything. Having the power of free movement to and from anywhere, they jetted between Corfu and Bhutan and Seychelles, colliding briefly with one another to invent new psychic spaces, to share the new fun of the incandescent future.