02/12/12
there’s no poem in the sky tonight. Like any other new Sunday here I get off the C tram to 5:37 tapping its minutes against every closed window I pass, every molecule of air hovering around me, not gold, not eye-blue. the clouds aren’t pink tonight. you aren’t here. I wish a lot of things. I wish that every patch of concrete my feet find weren’t only found. I pretend these are my choices. Out of every wild grid of streetlights and libraries, every new batch of mouths that speak my name, no zipcode has been given me on a stone tablet. No prophet has dreamed of my windows, my dim rooms. I can sing the names of every street that’s happened to have held me, and they won’t ever be a spell. I am only a body placed here or there by chance, falling through the universe into this sidewalk by the park or that one cup of coffee, black, three sugars, three billion half-reasons to be anywhere else. In any light, any where, I keep cities in my closed mouth as if my coffee-stained teeth could be a few skylines with their names dissolving on my tongue. I can taste them, then, without knowing it. I can leave Portland on the rim of a cool white mug or Amherst on the back of his neck. I can know they get washed away even after I leave, murmuring boulevard de l’observatoire into my winter hands, the coffee more expensive here, the same sky wanting its words.
