City Poems I

1.

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.

2.

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.

3.

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

4.

Utterance of morning,
the sky dims with imminent
wheels.

5.

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

6.

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.

7.

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.

8.

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.

9.

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

10.

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.