The Writing on the wall


Once driving an island road
I hit the brakes hard,
                        killed the engine,
like that.  I think I was me doing that.
 
Toward me the future bloated to my size
in spinning wheels, muscular legs,
a mob of bicyclists laboring for my life.
 
Engine dead, arms out stiff to the steering wheel,
eyes closed tight.  The future went past
as exhaled phrases, each speeding cyclist
against the air as an aspirated syllable.
 
Years pass. 
                    This morning the future's new gang
huffs uphill, two hours breathing
a few spoken words passing under the open window.
 
The small room fills with their audible breaths,
words sent onto the short white walls.
 
You are so much you, you are someone else.
                  




American jetsam


I could not tell you then but late nights
the day hovering over us
yellowed from our city breathing, and the drone
from St. Charles Rock Road louder
from late silence, just a few teenagers
racing our thoroughfare loudly
tagging it with black streaks of tire rubber,
tags radiating ways out of the city,
sweet quiet floated over
Saint Louis,
 
                    I heard a cause
flowing in mile-wide banks--crutches,
Bic lighters, baby teeth, tourniquets--a moan
so pitiful you made up a sad neighbor mouth
open to let it out, and you were wrong,
I thought.  That mouth was your emotional
convenience.  No neighbor could make
that moan,
                    not old Mrs. Curat who got
older leaning to your mouth, listening for
the world, maybe for that identical moan,
with an actual ear-trumpet,
                                    not young
bleeder Ricky (but knowing what it knows
now Breckenridge Hills wishes his moan
woke the "us" up in "it")
                                            not Russell
stashing photos of his sister naked
under his shirt touching his skin, fist-size stones
in his jeans pockets, his carrot and stick
to lure friends, fend off enemies,
both kinds of kids mocking him and his
pock-marked face looking as if he'd been stoned,
this Russell wasn't moaning,
 
                                                nor Kenny
living with his black teeth
in a tar-papered basement home,
 
nor Reverend Dickerson a block away,
his Dickerson Memorial Church door blessed
with a cross, doused with gas, blackened as if
in hell, repaired by the flock, doused with gas
once more for good,
 
                                    but now I can tell you
now that I am you and me.  If we hear
speaking in dreams, if we say
out loud "Help me" in bed with nobody,
if our necessary voices go on
in our heads always, then Mrs. Curat
lives next door forever moaning,
her daytime ear-horn at rest on her nightstand,
her night complaint to all the nights, a dull
buzz in her night head, a moan in ours.