In Transit

And for her heroin eyes

She didn’t remember dying there before

More talking about her perpetual childhood

Stories her father had told

“I could tell you something, kid

Only the rats eat in war!”

And there were other reasons too

I was inclined to depart

Always that something else

The past lingers to ask questions

Are you who you are today?

Assembled out of a discarded flush toilet

The shit god stood in its inchoate shadows

Minding its own business

John was orphaned at three and adopted at four

Whatever he found in the street required a second birth

The man slumped in his chair had all but withdrawn

Into atomic collapse. Would he have preferred Tchaikovsky

Rather than a weather report, watching his son fix a solution?

Are rush hours comparable to star clusters?

It wasn’t an office minded idea

In lunch time Manhattan they put their elbow space

In joke book aphorisms. “Excuse me, miss

Isn’t that my hand you’re writing on?”

The waitress’s stare looked as if it could cut onions

Asking me what I wanted. How do you talk to sheep

When you’re hungry for lamb?

In the city of clouds, the vagrants were just passing through

One said his autobiography consisted of three X’s

Recommended an oasis for transients a block from the pier

The usual riffraff adorning the boarding house steps

“Un perro sucio!” The landlady screamed

Squirting her water pistol at the guy

Insisting on keeping his door open while he masturbated

I stayed for a month, or it might have been for years

The place did have an indivisible notion of itself

How some things partition themselves in space

Was always a mystery to me