Parking For Strangers Poem by John Courtney

I saw you walking across the internet, the soul silent
behind the city, a cloud wondering where it would rain. We
taught ourselves to hide in unopened books, dined on code
that traveled from bedroom to bedroom, sat on the steps of
starving beauty knowing that some day, very soon, the back-
yard tomatoes she planted would rot from lack of attention.

But this place was not a train or like a child being born
on an elevator, directionless. And as we watched us
undress, like a newspaper in a puddle, we had to know
our pets would not chase after such an obvious wall of
night. We surely knew these people impressed by factory
poets were no more worth impressing than a gang of doors.

I suppose this is not unlike how a dead man can see
his widow squinting, trying to find the key to a back-
door in a bad neighborhood, the cars and buses whizzing
by, the children skipping school, checking on her tomato
garden, feeding stale bread to birds from opened books
as they whistle to the cloud showing it where to rain.