trash night

a choir of ambulances sings
me from my sleep

I am helplessly back in nyc
sty of shining glass
thirty centuries crammed into sleaze monuments
hard stone involuntary trees flowers rescinded
misdeeds loom headlights of tomorrow's moments
bearing down the future's flacid eyes
in the night of profound depth
this valley exploding in darkness
the little blossoming candle of
the megalopolis

it's not that I am lazy
it's just that I am scared
and lazy and that's why
the night awoke me
with the heat of its blasting moon
its babbling carhorns
the night a crypt the earth a flying tomb
basilicas of smut leapt from every streetcorner
manhattan gleeful with money
vituperative lights crackling from its marquee
I pull my curtain tight
against the hot breath of city light
columns of trash heaving slowly
on the breast of the lamb
windows guzzle darkness
jigsaw thoughts piece themselves
I will come out of this tunnel 
with corrected ambition
born from ultimate murk I streak
like burnt rubber you have your trees
and I have mine
and don't they all look the same anyway
the galaxy paces reinvented oceanic clock
boys and boys fall to the sidewalk
this night they must be reborn
the amniotic darkness construes me
into dancing form of smoke
a great creek falls on my head
subsumed in turpentine squalor
tomorrow that romantic aversion
the knees will press into our god
soil their proper pew
scuff marks culminate
in a utopian bastion of sound
sneakers squealing myriad
across the shiny gymnasium floor

flowers sting the french bulldog's eyes
she bites their leaves she likes the taste
strawberry potato leaves mint
in the chasm of night a soul is being prepared
we the ingredients mixing the future
I am half a recipe
let me carry my starving self nearer thee

my stubborn insistence on remaining who
I was
passes
like a stone
I give
myself
up

to you

and you

and you

and everybody

renegade musings prevent me from mattering much
smatterings of partially informed skepticism
my solidarity campaign with vanished torches
       lit and held by search party sent
       to recover the chanting stream
       that gave itself to the holographic pioneers

these pages lift no one but me
I the advice column I answer letters
I've written to myself my main task
is to hold myself back

batlaughter scratches the sky
strange punctuation sleep grows
over me like the mended sore of a grave
a wound sutured with ignorant death

maelstrom surfed
on a wooden door ripped
from its hinges

flashlight
eaten by limitless dark

flashlight
eaten by limitless illumination