FOUNDLING

I am the wearer of the Eternal Dunce-Cap.
Sparrows comb my hair.
My fingers are diamond speedboats,
my throat a turnpike which is always turning,
searching out the next bleary exit— signposts
full of stark and bludgeoned hunger. I am all
about the off-ramp, I am America’s Next Sweetheart,
blubbering about my passport and extradition treaties.
I stand for blunt instruments and catching the perfect wave.
I am the scissor in your pageant, the open blade.
I’m very worried about global warming,
if that’s where you want to go with this. I’m your foundling, swaddling and hypodermics aside.
I just want to put this parade in the past tense.
I just know I was born to decline this prize.

FISSURE WHEEL

You’re having a memory, or maybe a dream,
or was it a commercial you saw?
Of this kid in photo-negative, a snap-shot
of diffused, uncertain radiance,
but with a slightly poisonous hint to him,
like an atomic blast was brewing
past the strict safety of the park benches;
a fissure of threat and blooming.

You’re thinking about this when your subway stop
comes up, when it’s your turn to get off.
Goddamn. Your day has just begun.

BLACK TRANSISTOR

My great aunt gave me a black
transistor radio with tarnished gold knobs. I fiddled with it, spooned in soft
voices from the heavy, lisping tides of static.
I let it play quiet with candles burning while I lay in the bathtub and touched myself
for the first time to Barry Manilow.

They found her with music still playing low,
from the looming walnut wall console; a symphony station.
Face down in dark-stained roses of the carpet,
white lace doilies on polished tabletops still
hanging limp and dustless, windows shut.
I didn't want to play her radio after that, or hear the same song she might have heard
the music of the roses as she knelt down into them.

PARTIAL ECLIPSE

How I can darken like a stain
back to that same boy, full of tremors and uneven growth.
How the hurdles of third-grade race
fell like thrusting skulls behind me.
How I clambered the rope for yearbook photos.
How I hung there, burning, a wick seeking its end.

RIND

How I set my arm upon you
and it ripens
like the slow yellow smoke of pollution choking under its’ own weight.

How I’m still left with what I’m hiding;
a dirty-curbed snow angel,
a mismatched address, a botched serum, an escape.

DRAWN

In the hushed and forgiving silence
after a snow fall, distant voices
sound like they’re right in your ear;
they ride from shoal to shoal.
Even the abandoned, graffiti-glyphed public swimming pool can seem
like an inverted cathedral, a bowl of hope. The street lights saucer out, the sky
is mute with mist. But I know
the constellations still burn above.
One of them an archer, bow drawn,
eyes on his prey, and his arrow never to hit.
We pulled him that way out of the sky, stitch by stitch. Trillions of miles drawn
in one hushed breath.

WITNESS

In rows, windows across the street flicker out,
their slow flames, their steady yellow notes fading.

Something goes dark in me.

But if I wait long enough, until morning,
I know those lights will come on again.

It's that simple, paying witness to the living.