In Stereo Press

the lingering rage

at a city transformed

and return to a beautiful city

fans

and shutters for every window

my disappointment cloaks desire

for places I never knew

more

returns synonymous

with endings

return to what?

my mundane, brittle struggle

but in movement nests peril

I have witnessed

in a mess of broken glass

or spun into a puff of snow

then forgotten

motion gives the city rhythm

passing lights are music

in motion

in music

the city is renewed

hear the slapping beat

rubber, wood, glass, and steel

running childrens’ feet

the more fluid people flow

between the blue lights

sisters and spread

chromatic earth

nocturnal

but the lights are pinned

stable in their own circular

glow

pink or blue

watchers

mere witnesses of movement

loving its play

its slowness

the lives spun out

in coriolar passing

caressing

suburban streetlamps

show a life more isolated

cryptic

cats

cars

a divided geometry

wedges of light and dark

but still people anticipate

the nightly rising glow

artificial

sent wide

electric, concentric

pink orange puke

across shadows a summons

nailed to steel trees

ghastly and relentless

a legacy

haplessly placed

jutting skyward

hard as an incandescent spear

of stark radio static

thrust by huddled citizens

in the dark below

it is a lie to speak of rhythm

in a city lit every night

cursed orange lights

under an angry moon

full of punishment and spite

blue fire

longing

no music no music for

frail humans to drown to

in such places

skylines are punctuated by crosses

and bell towers

luring the blind

how I pity the panhandlers

and toss them my clacking shekels

but a part of a catalog

residential

streets, lights, shticks, shrieks

stripped bare

to the teetering trinity

to the dislike

and the workaday dullness of

wretched recluses

with their scrambled genetic geometry

their dense hirsute helices

and broken spines

from carrying so much aristocracy

on chinked and groaning shoulders

craving resilience

their only haven is disinterest

or denial christened anew each morning

no ethnicity only structures

built from tilting idealism

telekinetic and industrious

I try to forget

the man hustling

the lycra girl to the stopped car

his hands on her narrow shoulders

his leer at the open window

an interlude of urban amnesia demands

a certain nihilism

forget it all, I say

good, bad, destitute, indifferent

lights unhitched

forget tenderness

forego shelter

sometimes scientists

intercede against cruelty

inadvertently

style instead, and stasis

but the derelicts don’t listen

under their sheets of light

if only they were sturdier

I think

I could stencil them

ridicule and all

I’m tired

of curtseying

my strident credulity

has been stretched

way past any centrism I know

suckered

by seducers and their trinkets

I have become ticklish

hysterical

a lectured kestrel

untitled

I take

some comfort in the fact

I am born to this

eerie and heedless curtness

tethered by long parentage

to rekindled lights

in a poetry of place

and forgetfulness

I can tell myself

I am straight

and narrow as the dawn

as shiny

movement is movement

and everywhere is movement

settlers and cultists

a residue of myself

once huntress

now a ridiculed suicide

I have learned impotence

as self preservation

in the finest canned-ham sense

in the finest elitist

treeless detritus

the city persists

I slide all men

into final categories

secured fertile stations

here and here

I am inducer

I am lyncher

I am a trustee of a failed duchy

nestled under a steadily pinkening sky