Bookburnt

Scream, street theater. The opposable rum is a barrel

of funky chunks. Fish stories and whale mail,

rain or shine. Old man, what do you think of

your life? Are you a lot like the cradled? It depends

on how late it is, on your clock, to your midnight.

Good bye would have been nice, even salty or awful

bye would have deviced. As it is, object lesson not

imparted. Grammar unfreed, in correction, de

liberate failure. I check to see: do I repeat

myself? Listening, it appears tautological: I; repeat; my

self. That’s (a sweet start to a sour sentence,

a paragraph killer, a bingo card in high school English)

what’s meant by teeth hitting ceramic too hard,

coffee spilled on pants, too hot. One looks over one

shoulder to see if two can see what transpired.

A kind of respiration, my face assures. A bushy beard

embarrassment, lightly tattered shoes preferring

an empty grocery store whose cottage cheeses may

be pre-opened, likely spoiled, to the place where

the cheese section is three arm spans 

and the shoes are squeaky only by design.

Class consciousness, the kind that preferred assigned 

seats to that social unconscience, that unthinking blob

with as little will as the individual, which does not 

exactly reject what it does not understand as it shields it

self from change. Of course I read the books that said:

One is One is One. Until I hurt and fled and lay, beaten by

myself. On that day, sadly after your days, the sun did

what it does, and I left my shelves for love.