As/Is







7.16.2006


Cash Missives That Remind Us of Dead Time

sunlight like an animal
its rapture (breathing) shatter recital
gales coupling stipends with a stone defiance
hurled with other gestures at the cold, inert
features of the whole stinking affair (stuck in
a sweat-soaked and hungry sky)

burnt shrieks a hard truth
to carry down that dark tunnel
(always reeking of the visionary--always),
not that it stopped any of them
from walking as if physics really,
genuinely mattered

a simple striping of the herd drinking in the elegance of
nothing exposed but long, rusted pipes all alone in the private
subtleties of syntax caked to your jeans
(to somehow triumph over the tacit)
burrowed into skeletal frames become (the bars bitten)
a universal symbol of marginality, a matted density
stationed wherever the money goes to share its war,
its poverty, its crippling alienation
for many days and nights.