Red, burning against the harsh grey sky as the trees scream
fall! Autumn! FALL!–
but the sky won’t listen.

Me, sitting, warm by the window, cocoa held tight
to my chest, clutched and protected from the cold greedy masses,
has no reason to venture out into the slushy battle
between winter and fall.

Do you got a light?
For my overstretched nerves and the tingle between my shoulders and down my
back, ow, how I ache and need you to
spark me up–

Not with that flick of fire I’m used to,
the steer of your wrist to keep from lighting my
hair aflame
but with the moist warmth scratch of your face
and the heat of your skin(I know how you hate your shirt).

Set me ablaze–
I need you to turn my potential
kinetic.

The ashtray lingers, full of my love affair, lost,
and it’s like I’m still sitting here, red light glowing–
welcoming the city,
call me!

But light’s out now, folks,
No spider with arms open, wide open, and looking for flies–
Just me, face outlined in nothing
but the flickering seizure of the TV set,
scowling at the whirring, blaring, blast
of sirens, in this city, always sirens.

For once, though, I don’t lament the loss of purpose,
the missing rectangle hiding in my coat pocket,
the embers splashing on the walk
as my coat sends them floating in the current of the air–
the crunching rot under foot is entertainment enough.

You–
the confidant that held my hand,
who cradled me, who whispered in my ear when all I wanted was
to die–

You–
who could take me aside and tell me everything I needed to hear
and everything I needed to think
and everything I needed to do to make it
through today

any day.

But there is no salvation in your serpentine promises–
there is no comfort in your burning arms–
there is no–
I love you,
I love you,
I love you–

I’m sorry.

I think you’re late, or I’m early, but time
                pulled out,
                                  with the bus,
                                                           leaving me,

                                suspended.

My mind always works best in motion–
trees melt to rock, melt to shopping malls-
but waiting on the blacktop…
                                                          I can’t think.

Goosebumps raise, little Rocky Mountains of my arms.
(Here you are)
Nine hundred miles of rehearsed language and
I can’t grasp the words for
                                                  

                                                        hello.

but I am not an author–

just a scribbler of prose, haphazard and meandering and monotonous…

a lover of adjectives and neglector of adverbs, who fancies herself

Important.

I write,

pushed onward by that “burning desire” to 

fill notebooks and sully napkins,

but not author

Great Works.

I wield my pen as the businessman wields his basketball,

“I really could have been something, if…”

Only your arms,
tightly clenched,
hold me back
                   from
                          disintegration.

Grumbling under my breath about “my material conditions” rather than
“I’m starving, out of cigarettes, there’s $4.50 in my bank account and
I’m going to rip your fucking head off if you don’t hang up that cell phone and
take this change,”

I smile and ponder
“the coming period of struggle” while I feel
anger boiling in the aisles like pudding left too long,
bubbling up and lining the sides of the pot and the stove and the walls.

Soon those pimply boys will
capture the means of production with AKs and machetes,
occupying frozen foods–

a dictatorship of the proletariat, where
teenage girls rationing magazines to desperate housewives who
wait in the checkout line as the Bagging Savants load up the carts of
affordable filet mignon and pampers.

“Si Se Puede ,” I say,
but you don’t hang up your fucking cell phone and I just smirk and salute your BMW and my
Permanent Revolution.

May 5, 2009