Nunzio, y'announce, hey, life crumbs to Roma!
Not bad, Bad Boy of Bleecker Street. Tears
Blossom like gondolas full of dead watches.
Nomenclature, natural. Take for instance time

You introduced me to "flavored grappa,"
Hallucinatory ichor, redolent, swagger
Poem direct "step on it!" you demandeth
The cabdriver/dealer same sweet sun

At your funeral where Mama ran her boyfriend
Who'd fucked her son in the ass the night
Before out Lady of Pompeii as the Priest
Suggests nobody look, in brogue. We gape.

Roger says blowjob from the pulpit, you
Streaking your own funeral (as you did
Lowell-Ginsberg reading, St Marks, to
Mark the Unity of Poetries), your baptism

In same church! as you were laid out
--Hey whattam I telling you! you were
The Star, per usuam, Comet, the Brilliance!
-- cross street from your birth, home

The long way round infinitum. Who to
Invent Poetry now? Finally to understand
Happy Birthday of Death: yours! 1/17/01.
"Happy Birthday, dear Nunzio, HBTY."

"Nunzio," messenger or announcer, was Gregory's first name. His ashes will be shipped to Rome, to be interred in the American Cemetery, next to Shelley and Keats, where he belongs.