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My cat mimics dawn’s little nibbles

Of blue over Argyle Street – 

Here I wake up on none and

Straighten myself out quickly before the nibbles become chomps.


This is where I bite my teeth

And cut my nails

On eggs with three hot sauces cause two’s better than one and so on

And I have grown

Indecisive

And drunk on deprivation. 


Cheers to an ear ache and here’s to a toothache –

A solemn cavity I picked up biting on you

Into the small hours of the night.

If you chain me up for it – upside down –

It’ll piss you off, but I’ll be fine and

Adapt to the frantic nocturne measures of a bat’s life.


Anyway, we’re not all that different 

From bats









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Interrogating nonsense

In my orange peel bed

Where someone shed an earring once

And took off without much more – 


Twice I heard the chorus kids

Screaming overtones and so 

In my daze I was reminded of the paper I gave me

And to check out the big shot – 

He’s coming any minute now

And it’s very important you be around,

To receive him.


I miss so much of what you gave me

That sometimes at the job site I hit my head on the nail.

To quell the bleeding, your big thumb nail slides under

The orange peel, and pulls out gauze

And some feminine novacane stuff. 


We are interrogating nonsense again, this time alone

And it’s hard to understand 

Why the fish don’t bite 

On this side of town.







///







The concorde and I take off upside down

From Hydepark Street

Where they are scraping song and grief and love onto my chest

For the first time to the eye.

At 4 we taxi out our runway for home

And country music plays

Acapella out of the spitting geyser of my mouth.

The neighborhood blooms and bustles back to its condition

And focuses spider eyes on the impending day.


What fly might pass me?

Hopefully the juicy one,

Down on life,

And unbothered by avoidance 

Of nature’s attitude.


To us all it tilts its head

And speaks in tongues 

And speaks in rhyme

And riddle

And warns us

Of the day.

-

///

And to post it up near sky

Sweating like a dog, acrid and blue

Despite the trouble.


I will hang like your man here in my cave; I beat not on time or change now

But on air, 

I must give myself the best shot for lift that I can.


This will only hold me so long in the coil and upon 

Finding the jump of the snap, low down but as any good fledgling I must

Close my mind of mistrust.


Where do you lay all broken-winged if the nest is far

Up the tooly ladder 

And you have lost your shoes?


Take time to watch me cobble back together my wings

In plasters and then in air.


Circumstance put a nickel on my loss 

To this one final beating,

But in the drinkhaze forgot the weight of a healed wing,

All easy.




\\\







Ok, I’ll shoot for three – 

If I lie here for long enough, 

Will my head unscrew itself?

I watch the flocks of mixed birds 

Ache toward their day and the task

Of picking up their dog’s shit. 


How lucky I am to be so still. 


Sometimes when I need to shake I refer myself

To hounds in the library of stimulants that make me spin

Into something of a half-man


From which side I begin, I am not sure

To which side I end, I am not sure

But a month ago my childhood fell at my feet, and cut his skin

On the brick sidewalk cast in the soft orange nightlight of my hometown.


Maybe he didn’t see it coming

Or it didn’t see me

Or a combination of both

But there I was

Still

And watching




///

-

Street pitchers throw change-ups, fastball-screwball bullshit balls

At passerbys

While some judicial mess careens into the wall

And sues a cop for the damages.


You eat your eggs slow, like how you cook them.


Generous with patience; you budget time like a monk

Who is running late for daily meditation. 

Who’s to say how we count our change?

Where we dock our posters and hang our boots?


This time, I’m sure

I found the answer


At least for a few minutes.


Because as she folds her paper eight times by the window

I’m reminded of the transparency of the binds

We are caught in from above.


I have to put down the sharp things that papercut

And make my hands sting.

They are productive, sometimes, 

Until you overbid

And draw a spade.


///















///





Like a virtue,

Change came down

And kissed me again

Behind the ear of the building, in the rain.


Unlike the other times,

Its lips ran soft, small, and quiet against mine,

Trembling. 


I blushed and told it that my nerves were reacting to the cold,

Not this airy presence pressed against my skin.


The pawn shop man was kissed that day, too,

But didn’t know it

Because as quick as it pursed,

It turned and snuck between

The wooden-glass-silver folds

Of his cluttered mind.


It found the electrical hum of his spine amusing,

And so chasing a better laugh

And a little more warmth

Wormed its way into some cavity of the body

To root for a while.