Smoking on the corner

You strike a match
and cup it against the breeze,

flame to cigarette tip,
a deep inhale,

your knees ache in the chill
when nothing else fills the bill,

the choking burn slides
up and down the throat,

the lungs are harsh words
said in in flaming briar patch,

soon enough your cup
will filled with enough

nickles , dimes and
half torn dollars

for both a bottle and a bed,
indoors before the rain,

out again before
they empty the dumpsters,

you take another drag
and notice the moon

appearing white and round
like the police flashlight

as the clouds clear
in the wind and

the burn in your throat
makes you think

of rooms you moved out of
and back into over and over again

over the years
that now reside in each

ravine you find
every time you wash your face,

"Tonight I drink to you"
say with a nod,

vapor and smoke disguise themselves,

"tonight I sleep with the moon
until morning lights up the streets

or things remain very dark
and quiet".

You are what you think you're eating

A knife , fork and
a cracked plate
don’t constitute a meal ,
though all three items
are handy for show,

as are empty frames
on the wall when
there is any kind
of company visiting ,
who demand our attention,
taxes, documents of your legal rights,

you just say
it’s the wall you
wanted to highlight,
the frame is only a, well, a, well, uhhhh,
a framing device!

to bring a viewer’s attention
to the rub of the paint,
the embedded fingerprints,
the light switch in the center,

Likewise, it’s knowledge
we’re hungry for, isn’t it?
Knife , fork, cracked plate
are about the idea of eating
as others go without
forks, knives, or cracked plates…

Dead ethics professors
choke in non-intrusive urns
and French deconstructionists
blow kisses from
balconies and any perch
they can secure,

Appearances are misleading,
explanations are fiction
worth listening to for the
way the words wrap around
each other until it’s no longer
an announcer ‘s baritone
intoning the world in whole
but rather melodies flitting about
like nervous birds
trapped in a small cage,
a messy page of tuneless songs,

all this for a description
of my house that now seems
to rest on top of a giant hill,
bracing clouds and tree tops,

a form I’m filling
out asking me
to describe myself
and all the desires
I would bring into
the world if finances would allow,

I would allow everything is
what gets written,
and everything not forbidden
would be described
in the rhetoric of future tense,
when software rules the body electric.