I.

The truss spanning-

a sweet bridge

Over silent water pooling

The sanguine river locked up;

Rioting, sleeping, in the deep winter.  

tapping into-

There are fences, wires, electric

light fixtures and alarms;

invisible sound waves and

pulsing energies

that placate bodies,

our minds made useless

in the packing noise. 

at the museum

I am called Misko by

my dead mother like feathers

on a furtive animal-bird.

The kind that rolls in underbrush

like it can’t fly

but it can fly in a flapping beat.

borrowed

"The sands whispered, Be separate, the stones taught me, Be hard. I dance, for the joy of surviving, on the edge of the road." ---Stanley Kunitz

V. (shoel)

The sliver of shaded dirt

where people wait

and waiting remain speaking

through their aching dreams.

In cycles, the moon is cold

on their limbs, their faces;

Not quite the day-night

but still time

moving like a sifting sea coast.

There is only dulled feelings,

opiates in stilled bloodstreams

a canonized set of sweet sense,

the only remnants of living.

No more names under the world

the heaviness of hurtling matter

through forever is constant

and silent-- our shadows slip

in between the earth and our fingernails,

the half-moon scratchings

of children in the dirt.

IV. (sermonizing)

The smell of living is distinct

and absent from America.

A fear of death

dictates that beginnings

be coddled like favorite children

while adulthood is lost

to routine.    

But the beginning of anything

is weighed down by

everything. There is a false

freedom in a new idea or body.

Experience is a full range

Of (e)motion and it gives

moments of immortality

to the whole

of a human.   

III.

Being oblique, the buildings

of the city pretend to be military.

They sit rumpled in approximate lines

encroaching into each others’ space

like old men and women on the tramway.

But when has streamlined, gridded picture

ever freed a place from culture-weight?

I will take the approximate

order of the everyday-

the kind of city that fleshy hands make

that brains stained by woodland sun

and turquoise water create

one generation after another-

a free metropolis.