A Few Coins                                

Blue ones

under brown.

Not eyes but houses.

Almost evening.  Paper sheets

that scurry from the shadows.

Advertisements, bodies

lit from within.  Spotlights

on hand-printed walls.

Rain soaks through.

Separates ink

from glass. Yanked wires

dangle.  Our tiny legs

one hundred feet

above the snow.

the floor

apparently damp

from just having been washed

nevertheless tugs at your soles

in that greasy way

you’ve come to expect

from the green and white tiles

leading past the kitchen

to the bathroom.  It’s not just the grill

you smell, it’s ghosts

of cigarettes from the night before.

Back from washing

your  hands, you order

a small chicken soup

which you can’t swallow

without wincing because of what that last

blow job did to your throat.

You’re the only customer.

The five or six waiters

have stopped talking, surely staring

at your repeated failures

to keep a single noodle

from falling back into the bowl.
 

Glass                            

Jagged me burns, still.  The sidewalk drowning sun.  I mean my own head, invisible, hurts the level fear above, true to punish my lampshade anger.  Bare warning like a light but then you see, embarrassed.  How the wall wound falls, just depressing.  Supposed to look a distance actually graceful, seen out shocking.  Which is not a funnel.

Muscle inhabits the younger you, down on side wind.  To discern, sometimes.  Bone never all when one raises the breath effect; we replaced that out soft.  Time layers the taking, once born.  We smoke the same trails.  We, stupidly, could clean a tiny image equation.  Ridiculous to find, in fact, our lives secretly hiding that ground-leering color I imagined.

Fear to me that the nightmare sparkles, light protruding.  I can’t drown its own contemptuous meaning.  Commonplace bulbs picture water there, radiating graceful glass to be.  Upward shards a fountain.  Backwards feel, spiraling, that’s how.

Huge you rushes the window open like a hand-canyon raised.  Your heel on one fingertip arcs a carbon trajectory embedded in blood.  Danger, we laugh, relative to the evil it represents.

who open will open

mouths, silent

birds, letters

slipping

from their wings -- perpetual arc

of feathers

how he’d rise through the air

if he could, letting go his painter’s

jagged exhalation, full of bones

only to God he hopes

this colorist’s pipe

threads under ribs

the Lord negates

contraction of yarn

around the edges of a pool

of milk, five fleshy numerals

obscuring cubes, volumes, lines,

solids, a great shimmering wall

of kept birds

floating endlessly upward

each one another Icarus

come circling back

to sit in judgment

beside the sea’s salt rain

or, lidless, idle

at his feet

Celine Half Hugs, Half Knocks Him Down              

Got his smile washed

in the glare of the propositions.

Some diligent mutt.  God-of-the-hay?

Must’ve been a different year,

bus wire threaded through the alley’s

narrow passage, paint

strings looped to Tennessee.

She stands his picture still.

“Champagne for representation

and a dip in the Chesapeake!

Hats off to the moon who makes

the nectarines grow!”  As if all those trees

were graves.  As if she could deny

the low sad panoply

of logical form or the iron

tension between his bones.

He blows the sidewalk,

gaze down.