Too many of the children on this street
should have been in school an hour ago.

I wipe the egg
off my jacket and marvel at how
it’s already eating through the material.

This is a bad place to live. I think about that, too.
Violent music is always playing from a car
that’s probably parked in somebody’s house. Dead art students
drink caffeinated beer and kill off homeless literary celebrities.
It’s probably more fun than waiting for the lightning
to bring their senior projects to life.

I think about losing my house key to a girl
notorious for pyromania and taking on all comers.
She hangs around the bars on Karaoke night.
She waits for someone with a hundred dollars
in the bank and even more invested in a series
of memoirs about young love and monster movies from Texas.

She lives for low self-esteem and has thousands
of self-portrait photographs on her computer.

I was half-asleep when we met up,
and all I can really remember is what she did
to my ribs and how long it took me to find
my teeth on the floor.

In the end the key really isn’t important.
The air-conditioning doesn’t work,
and the downstairs neighbors
are cooking stray cats for the Saturday orgy
spectacular. There’s always music that doesn’t fit
the moaning. There’s a tall dude in a long black coat
who ducks through the backyard and disappears
as he leaps over the fence.

He’s a voyeur with a bunch of figurative hearts under his hat.

I’ve seen him dozens of times
and routinely suspect that I used to be that guy.

Don’t be scared though. I’m not. I’m too cool for that.
Weird things like that happen all the time.

Why just the other day,
I saw more than a dozen people
over the course of six hours
react to shotgun blasts from last week.

I also saw a young lady look stunning
in her ancient summer dress as she made
off with the kind of flaming sword
that can level a town like this in just fifty years.

04/21/2010

Posted on 04/21/2010
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