SURVIVING DESIRE

Coming out
The tunnel from Carroll Street
The graffiti reads CHOKES

HIS CHICKEN EVERY NIGHT and we
The passengers convene
Momentarily, the entire lot

Suspended slant as if
The F were some roomy
And ad-laden

Rollercoaster safely blasting
Through the patently everyday
Landscape of traffic

And ruin, rivet-studded
Girders grumpily trellising
The smog-blue-gray

Sky, May and too
Many mornings have I spent
This week observing

The recumbent figures
Of capital tragedy
Their scaly ankles dangling

From soot-soured Wranglers, it’s cyclical
The way one devours his own
Carefully tended ignorance, a slow

Canceling of accumulated skew
As the mutilations fall
Off and are just as quickly

Replaced by others, the spell
One conveniently
Forgets, the mask one

Tries on and unobservantly
Absorbs, the train’s
Sibilant burble hurrying

Forth as the signal greens
I deny the existence
Of anything barely beneath

This concrete, any lurid node
Pulsing beyond the sky’s stately
Dome, fuck this

Forever grope after
The mysteries of a sphere
Eaten by worms

Regurgitated by birds
Paralyzed by windowpanes
We are all of us

Pulling over to mourn
At anonymous tombstones
Rifling 100%

Cotton clouds as a little girl
In a purple sweater
Chases a brown pigeon

Along the platform’s edge, believing
Is a form of expectation, all
Knowing is actually belief and 'something

Tells me tonight I shall
Dream of newspapers
Wrapped in fish,' dreams always

Having lead my kin
Through the variegated
Thoroughfares

Of skin and smog and sometimes
I tremor at the way
The world seems so vigorous

One second and the next
It’s swimming, each dumb leaf
Resorting to metaphor

As every winking turn traps
You into thinking life
Is a meticulous plot allotted

To you alone, people
Topple, transubstantiation
Fails, the board

Reads KNOWING IS NOT ENOUGH.