The avocado seed has sprung a leaf.
The tomatoes have sprouted like miniature trees.
A fairy garden toadstool sits in abstentia
Beside the nepenthe in a clay flower pot.
Even the loud inside voices resolve like a clock.
And yet, still I walk, in Arbutus, on furlough
With a girlfriend and a blue electric current
Of terrifying excitement, past the dismal, uneventful
Morgues, as if something in me inspirits the TV
Antennas of the tiny townhomes where the prisoners
Of Westinghouse Electric have been lumbered
To detachable blocks, headshrunk to a patch of land
Under the fraudulent promise of having traded up.
But I had the girl, in that moment, and a card table game
To get to, and it brought out the black of the night
Enough for the blood to rush, and the push to lift her
Like a dime past the trellis of a coal railtrack bridge
Through the mist where everything ends
Because I loved her so much.
So much that the streets made me responsible
For the unacknowledged lies of every passerby.
I spoke their names and was complicit,
Like Gertrude Stein and Oakland,
The unalloyed stare into the maw of Baltimore,
A bottomless pot of Muhly's coffee
That never stops receiving, like a mirror.
