A decoration that goes off in sizzles

It takes three hours to prepare a newspaper.
In three hours a tenement can burn to the ground.
The next performance is in three hours.

In a wet city a block is blazing.
Whirling newspapers flap to the ground.
They ought to prepare for the next performance.

The choreographer and architect are thoughtful.
Their newest thoughts are grounded in ancient thoughts.
Their hair is kept in place with chicken fat.

Dreamland’s whirling bonfire burns
every three hours, then is put out.
The same victims are again miraculously saved.

That’s what they think, that’s what
the newspapers say, that’s what the tenants say.
The fire ought to be put out periodically.

After sizzling, the dance reforms in many layers.
Three hours pass on a miniature block
with a population of German midgets.

The questioning is persistent,
questions running down a little avenue.
All of them should go up in a blazing bonfire.

Then there would be an empty lot on the block.
It’s citizens would be cats.
The midgets make heroic efforts.

Their valor goes unrewarded.
They want to be repatriated to Equatorial
Dreamland, where fat melts in sizzles.

New York is not Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania is not Italy.
Italy is not Africa.

The further away they are the less of a flap it makes.
They must prepare to return home.
For the newspapers it’s a performance.

What ought to happen happens.
More thought ought to go into it.
Preparing to perform, he ought to get up.