Jalopy Life

From "Jacket" (Verse Magazine co-publication), 2002


Jalopy Life

How will it be today? Reading the newspaper is a filthy habit
aside from being a reductive one taking what is and sodomizing it
grid applied to commerce applied to the skin where it smudges —
but to voyage is victory and we trudge on swallowing our feelings
breaking up among divers things such problems as I have named
when of course there aren't any really to lathe with music and work
gingerly down the neckhole or lugie up splat on the sidewalk
where other like-minded people step trundling on toward the obelisk
where standing hand-in-hand we will receive our instructions:
Go to your job sites and maintain your composure
How much longer however will we be allowed to keep our apartment
and if we are to ‘come to ruin’ then will that ruin stand
tomorrow as today pillars amid which children gambol
and in the trees glazed with frost will the inscriptions penned by ancient hobos
‘friendly farmer’ ‘bad water’ ‘pass here only by night’
remain reliable, remain that trust that can only exist between hobo-brothers
out of trial and the arcs of good and evil that interlocking point
the middle way out of what is otherwise etched by dazed expression
quickies, furtive looks? Suspicion flashes at the margins
of all we do as though one step off this well-worn track fire cats crouch
and genies the heft of mountain ranges leer
and what is visible is only the beginning of fear and like belief a 3-dimensional
rendering of a burning house or an acorn mashed
into the surface of the ground. A cabbie counts change at an intersection
Leaflets are being passed out up and down Madison
guiding passers-by deep into the bowels of buildings
without any floors without rest ledges on which a look of searching lingers
like a mist

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