CITY POEMS I

 Allowing time
 to develop, watching it
 sit curled like a twist
 of smoke,
 sticky perhaps, stuck
 between my eyes and all
 your
 presence.

 A preliminary
 to the occasion:
 the walk down shellacked
 streets.  I could watch those thoughts
 pace me on the asphalt.
 They heft strangely,
 oddly shallow.
 
 The city is sounds, and at odd
 intervals.  A thought
 has the force of
 an accident and the
 same effects.

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 A new chapter of the city
 is the approach
 of the metalsmiths.  Soon the
 sidewalks burn startling
 ornate: pedestrians trip over
 inlay, the homeless
 stamp across the embossed plazas
 all night long.

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 Sounds and utterings
 more human than their source
 violently twisting free like a
 cursed pocketbook.

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 Utterance of morning,
 the sky dims with imminent
 wheels.

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 With evening I blow among
 gusts of errant radiowaves
 clattering impressions
 onto my skins my contributions
 to the city avid and opaque.

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 Streets bruised-blue,
 minerals, streetlights
 the shape of brushed cymbals
 and maintenance
 never a problem.  It's just us
 who echo around in
 need of renovations.

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 Easy for them, thoughts I mean, to
 turn orthogonal and slip
 between molecules.  A place
 like this gives you the "getting it, really,
 having it, you know,
 everything" -- navigating the
 dictionary of coffee just does that.

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 Movement the tenor of which
 you never knew existed:
 a sudden roll of the head
 and you're gone, you never were,
 the twist a severing
 between eye and eye.

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 Here the air's gotta be further away.  We've got
 the ground stretched up
 and us in funny shapes to catch clues.

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 You can kick and jitter and stamp
 like a hobo and fling yourself further
 but you're dealing with packed ground,
 footed on fossils-in-the-making.  No
 way you'll root yourself here without
 breaking some law anyway.