The poet that I never read is leaving town.
The men, it seems, have disappeared entirely.
There are so few vagrants left to comb the weeds’
Safe spaces in between the warehouse tracks,
Chasing – do we even remember? – some flat-tailed
Whippoorwill – completely imagined – as it flies
To the nearest piano bar, where it is safe to
Understand women, though most are leashed to shopping
bags
With unheard but no less oppressive timers
As they sigh into the grain of faux mahogany.
I haven’t the imagination to conceive
The poems he would write – shuttled like a shuttlecock
Between the Woman and the Man – and children too sad
They must steal away any time for words as their
Service to his cause, the long, inarticulate sigh.
When did they stop looking the other way at
Perversity? When did it become such a gift?
If I knew what closes in as truth, not consequence
I might be more upbeat about experience
As it leaves like sewage to the nearest no place.
The razor wire, it glistens, but it seems a pale
Contrivance of a world long left behind,
Where they cared enough to quiver at the bad.
When you’re always wrong, there’s always opportunity
To admit it. The dishes always must be cleaned,
The clothes themselves will say how they’re to be folded,
A problem besides why that guy left for the hills
Will fill my mind tonight. The past will have to wait.
