Feet can’t seep the street
keeping to themselves
they rub but never meet.
*
Overhead lines run
into grids. Wires
dim light. Guide
empty lids
into dormant lips
*
Homes and horizons, labyrinths
whose walls never converge
*
–
Recharge the battery,
replace the light bulb,
–
switch the filament
with its firmament,
–
return electric
–
to being-
–
Permanence
–
will shed its skin
–
*
–
The barrier of this age
but sedimented mnemonic
and the map work made
over the ever changing
–
*
–
and the wringing inside our heads,
when in the eyes no one responds
–
is but despondence to our thoughts
and words, the-would-be exchanges-
–
conversations birthed born
to exhaustion,
–
dust
in settled bitumen
–
*
–
The answer blockaded by the question,
an art we condition, dilate
and disillusion.
–
A cigarette we collect, conflate
and regret,
–
Until bird shit splits the egg,
clean in relief,
–
Offers smatterings of essence
on a consciousness put to sleep,
–
And the grit stuck between the teeth
are words you feel, but never say:
–
Language is a civilization
under pavement,
–
People are cities
feet teetering beneath steeples-
trees twisted and configured
to our latest loss of meaning
–
Dreamers of galaxies, but victims
of singular visions
–
*
Short sighted
in night blindness:
–
our wires dim light,
our lines run into grids,
guide empty lids into arid lips-
–
fissures, we keep, but never heal
