urbansonnets

Turn your cheek in the absence of feeling
you know, the way you do when you cannot
cope with the fact that you spend days stealing
now empty words that were but now are not:

Your speech is spent, there’re no words left to give
away, the sea is closer than you think –
bury your thoughts and drown your will to live
and return salty, unburdened, from the brink:

Hide your face, your tongue, the time has come to slip
into looser garments of earthliness
and flood your language in the planet’s hip:

Here stalactites torture with unending drip
and the taste of mineral emptiness
a heavy metal on your toxic lip.

What times we shared beneath this gloaming skin
splashed and treated with Florida water,
hushed and prayed over to free us from sin
–though Alcolado Glacial is better:

Like a freestyle beat tense and firm we light
out in the cold drawing smoke from our chests
while the night sky shies from the back porch light
paving cracked asphalt with our blank guesses:

There’s no point to moments like this but grace
and permanence in the So Flo evening,
puddles greased with third-rate G-funk and bass,
trunk stereos dripping as rainbows ring:

The grass itches if you sit down too long,
so loiter on the green box for one more song.