FLICKER

The Chrysler Building, as seen
from the end of a suffused, sun-setting
boulevard in Queens, is a mirage.

The old woman, the smile
stitched on her face, her eyes
blind to cross lights, is a mirage.

Tell me what I see, then.
A late afternoon collapsing in on itself.
Me, a willing cripple,

bowing toward the river of quick renewal.

CORRUPTION PSALM

Looking out the train window at sunset,
the sky-writing overhead just starting
to dissipate. The lazy smoke curly-cueing
into indistinct eternity helixes,
or lost DNA strains. They’re trying to say
something. They’re still words,
just the same.

BREAKING SHORES

If the rain were a telegram
then I’d be talking to everyone
at once, all of us under
a singular, spreading touch,
as tires sluice, and cast-off
voices echo down slickened night corridors, as
the desperate seek same,and the quiet
keep their own company;
a litany of raindrops outside
their plain-framed windows, a certain memory made uncertain, wavering, tide-like, breaking
and unbreaking, never
staying the same.

IDENTITY DOCTOR

You’ve got nothing in your palm
but a hybrid abolishment witchcraft,
a flower bloom in reverse;
the seaming of lips, the erasure
of fingertips, magnolia blossoms
made blind to the sky.

This Spring time hypodermic,
a symphony you’d best euthanize
a lull to cash in on, again and again.
Rub a finger, start a fire.
God bless the combustion
at the heart of every engine.

Delicate amidst sharp
stones; winter feet
on summer ground

Sparrows shiver
on telephone wires
the first rain in weeks

Resting in the cool shade
of a graveyard; car horns blare
past the iron fence