Drop by drop, line by line,
a strict waitress stones herself across three centuries,
raining pellets of dissonance where mimes inhale
spirited democracies crushed by celebrity.
Superior winters trample the noontime
forcing happiness into neglected strains of a city,
emptied of all but vaguely remembered tragedies,
emptied of all but stranded fools and the
failure of mythical plans.
I boil exotic coffee close to your chest,
stripping air from your body in
favor of a lost concoction,
in favor of assertions into your imagined nobility.
Tremors through the pistolwhip,
jinglebells of whitewash grabbed by plunderful means,
jump and hunt for crosshatched buttons,
bust a testicle running against childhood politicians
hobbled by inadequate funding but lofty in the
bluntness of fools.
Noses run, eyes yellow,
shit stains pissed away by best friends
stick to the porcelain of your mind.
I am watching the calm pace of exhaust
pump and draw the shiny brain of your
unfathomably deep ocean. Arts and letters
scratch themselves along your face,
vapid songs from decades past pile
heavy balloons on top of
starving cars speeding holy and hot through
troubled streets emptied of direction.
You hold your hand and punch at blinded flesh,
stumbling headlong up trampy ambulances which
hoarsely wheeze interpretable siren-signals,
some mysterious others blunt,
all of them rattling down maladjusted Interstates and
crawling through the cupboards of consciousness where
each of us knows our fate, each of us
understands the process of being
digested by life and society and
re-introduced as a bottomless cave where
undeserved fame absorbs prisoners in hiding.