The Urban Soup (Part XVII)

I. College & Huron

Leaving the enclosures of
Bay windows is
Tough: I end up
Beside flat windows—
Flat windows
In libraries
Where bubbling lines of
Text march across my skin as
I shake off the ink and
Write up
An imagistic ditty:
Trees so brown—going on
Grey and—squirrels
Going on branches that
Meld into graffiti;
Walls held so high above
A fire escape—in
The distance tremors &
Moloch’s towers—a throwback
To the past—where
Every shimmering drunk
Was holy haloed & the
Terror thru the wall
Shook the drywall to dust,
But back
To tests & the
Analyzable: to
Theses &
Throw-ups
Hearing the homeless man
Throw up: “Sir, you can’t
Sleep in here”…
And children
Learning Chinese glyphs
Like arabesques pierced
With French accents-la-grave
Getting spun & oscillated—
Sectioned into 50 um slices—
And raised on nails by
Librarians whose stockings
Are descriptors—grey & runny—
Of brain matter underlying
The subconscious—not id!—nothing
That stupid…
…and coughs come—the
Occasional “motherfucker!” from
The intersection in front
Of the
Flat window
Just enough to scramble
The children’s Chinese glyphs
Into inky text that stays
On your hand for days—
Days, which should pass as
30 repisodes & the specifics
Are blurry and Gestalt—
And this terrifies me… that
I am unable; or unwilling, that
We have unhinged the conscious
Trailer but the motor is still
Shot to shit—
So good!

II. (Obligatory Haikus)

Soft pink ray from cloud,
Lights up spinning barber pole,
Frozen leaves skitter.

The window's caked in mud,
Brown splotches decorate gray sky;
Lightpost shimmers orange.

Rear wheel frozen in:
The mound of snow collapses.
The spokes have been bent.

III. The Thawing Park

Kings don’t parade down these cul-de-sacs
Petition papers get stuck in mud
Whose stickiness we could never appreciate

The oaks that grew there could:
They managed to plow the earth
Getting the people of the valley
Their core samples

And the oaks get ground and processed
And become petitions or the skeletons of elections
Which we lose—
And lose the girl

The ballot that we taped
As a poster on the windows—
As a totem for the peyote shamans down the block
Who only talk about cacti,
Leaving oaks to spin freely on the grinder.

Consider: "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite."