Virtuoso
I found you in a gray yard, politely brimming,
policing the clearings in a stranger’s voice.
Listening to a radio you wanted to intercept
the meaning of what was heard, the anthill-like
spaces, deep, filled by chatter of announcers.
You saw the sound fade, its colors hung.
A hidden doorway threw itself open.
No one entered. Only you saw this escape hatch
from surveillance, a thing which to you is common
but to most an invisible intruder. Wide.
You consider your mistakes, line them out
as pellets rifled from a slingshot hidden in a
chastity chamber at a church hostel. Dust harangued
you, chanting your failures with a priestly poll but
saving its tricks for those illusions you can not
create by yourself. Inside. Nickels and stones
deserted you but dust settled on the sod-like grin
you shared with a fellow traveler, a patient
on the bus who knew your name without asking,
who sat in the ugly gloaming, arms crossed,
delivering litanies of a trauma long rested but
endlessly reflected in its own suffering.
Nothing is left of your decisions. Empty chairs and
gravel sewage blink from saying yes to your
flashes of freedom. You bury the results in a
comic book, in full color Sunday Best, the
tempest burping beneath joyless influences of
unsettled dust from a stranger’s forgotten youth.
