Trying to find my roost
one lidded, late afternoon,
the consolation of color
...
We loiter in the cobblestone alley,
Beans, Clams, Yom-Yom and me,
smoking punk. Snip the wiry stem,
trim the nubby end, scratch fire
...
A grainy predawn dark, early Expressway traffic
bleeding arterial tail lights across gray water
and its blue heart. Under Lemon Hill,
grunts from Boathouse Row, woodshop clunks,
...
Use me
Abuse me
Turn wheels of fire
on manhole hotheads
...
In my dream I watched it
from a windowsill Come see this
raptor's shadow hushed
down green-brick tenements
...
He put the spirit essence
the light pip not only
in each eye's albumen
concentrate of starlight
...
rumdumb from last night's shrubbery tryst
exhales soot, fernseed, shoots and vines,
brings his hot breath from the city park's wood,
saying a song we don't understand
...
Hobos wail a garbage can against
the cyclone links. The monkey puzzle tree
droops its scaly tails above our heads
as she sets up near the zoo's bonobos,
...
From where I stood at the field's immaculate edge,
walking past the open patch of land that's money bounded,
in California's flat sunlight, by suburban shadows of houses
occupied by professors, lawyers, radically affluent do-gooders,
...
The poetry's arrested in his scene,
which can't be trusted, because I saw it
through painkillers that softened my head,
after I'd asked him what Keats really meant:
...