Stepping down the stairs
into blowing bellows of
steel air, platforms of grey rush
through with bodies stacked,
howling at another day's
breathing. I wait my turn on
segmented concrete stripping away
years in its private archaeology.
When it acquiesces, screech to
a numb drone, I enter; one foot
careful to step between the divots
of the wood; between soil-stained
suits and the last of the sundresses.
The drilling beat; more platforms,
a mass of mottled cloth, pierce subterranean
pits dimly lit, so as to escape laughing
death outside, so as to get us there on time.
To assure the clockwork persistence of men
in one place or the other even after clocks.
In the finishing, the will remains defiant,
a muttered hymn that opens the air,
a hollow threat that promises
an eventual return back to that
interminable
before.
Moving through sewn city streets
in a ricket that was once missing
half of it's front end:
the civil shell molts, a carapace of
boarded glass protecting,
the outside from a constant river
of bottomed-out drywall and wire. Shrouds
on stoops using the haze of butcher paper
and tobacco, metal chairs to prop up
what's left of their bodies, hesitant
to melt back into the asphalt as quickly
as oil drains through pipes.
We're huddled like pilgrims in
familiar rain, meeting where
a tungsten light breaks the dark,
the final compostelos,
rushing to get anywhere, putting down
our burdens and staking a claim.
There are so few of us now that
to tighten together is the only
cure for feeling rare; fading
visions of heat on skin,
shared hallucinations when the
tires turn and we close our eyes.
When I was young I remember
seeing pictures of the favelas of
Brazil, a city folded in on itself,
the curtain of the slum,
and the shipbreakers of other
beaches, the garbage pickers.
How like another planet the
landscape looked, alien and brune,
stained by dayglo streaks,
with lithics of metal and adapted
limbs in interplay,
forever inscribing an indigenous
Lascaux into the soil. If I knew how
I would often forget that my body
was not among those, how I could have
honed my hands; how sharp would be
my tools for etching the art
of human suffering.
The engine growls to life in a fit
of smoke; a familiar black ghost.
Eyes stuck halfway between
resignations from outside glass
panels; 'is this the bus to chinatown?'
No, that stopped running years ago.
We move, to be the only thing moving,
against the black sheet of the firmament.
We will go underground among the roots
and the fungus and try to grow green
things where nothing has the right to grow.
We will pass the time until the finishing
in a solemn procession, in the cool
silence of water dripping, in the heavy
heat of forgotten speech, at the end
of history, searching for the light of a
world that flashed for a moment
between the clouds.
