love and hunger

So I walk upon these diamond sidewalks
with a heart in my back pocket, peddling
playing cards with faces, asking only
for a second time to hold your hand
beneath the cold avacado sun as the
fire engines tear holes in the aura
of silence, as the police are blocking
off the roads in displays of arbitrary
whatevers, as the whatevers are becoming
whoevers in the miasma of suburban
esoterica known as the disorganized mass
of community.

The traffic stares, the traffic cares
about vagries masquerading as substantialities,
about substantial gasolines refined by
the delicate operations of greed, all that
glass and aluminum rushing down rivers,
all that smoke and dross and ancient motion
manipulated into acceleration (this is the
physicist talking) and all the hurried
completion beneath a dark moon as the
night unfolds its shadows across the veldt,
as the veldt unfolds its fiction of emptiness
across the great expanse of asterisms.

Ruined by melody, defeated by perfume,
a short man in swimming trucks once told me
that I wasn't going to have a room,
a suburbanite informed me that the ghost-faced
killer drove a motorcycle and wore a halloween
mask, but the ghost faced killer told me
that some of us had to last, some of us who
drank harmonies in the cadence of sloshing
vessels could shoot lasers at Saturn's moons,
a woman i met talked with too many hands
told me that my life essentially was ruined,
but I did not believe any of these things
all too soon.

Call me what you will, we are all just
graveyard holes to be filled, call me what
you will, we are all just dancers with
the starlit fumes, we are all just disasters
masquerading as masters, we are all just
candles glowing in this ancient room.