Lying poets, they take their words to street
And sweep their hidden eyes to the pissant stone of curb
And drink in the sound of vehicle
Dreaming to be heard as loudly
But soft
And dreary
As the cloud
that casts its watchful shadow
Over the golden hills at the edge of space
And perpetually disposed themselves
Of any real fluidity

The sun pecks at the skin of the earth, as the waves of heat dance for her
And I become lost in the very essential part of it
That runs across the blades of grass in a quiet park
Where children scream gleefully and rub up against the chain-link
And the dogs empty themselves in feeling

The church bells, a trolleycar, the hobo collecting cans from an oasis of free trash bins
I drink the taste of **** and flower fields in the sweet summer sun

I could not believe what I had begun

The dream of Milton, my friend Kerouac, the Republic
The marble columns on Sansome
They are a treat to my ever-aging eyes
Seeking something in the dirtied troughs of heat
In the summer sun

But when will I be done?

All of you below
Are little tiny ant-people
Bumbling through these funny streets
Hidden beneath my shadow.

With their cut cuticles of hair
And those knotted clumps of muscle
Around the pebble streets they roam
To destinations unknown

All around are towers of steel
All air conditioned and ventricled
Made of stone and office drone
They are the buzzing hives of employables

On the street the blood cells meet
On embolic artery of Battery
On varicose Vein of Sansome
The exoskeleton of this city
Curbed with Grey
and auburn streaks

Far away
Beyond the bay
In the neck of a wood's decay
The tiny ants feast on bark
As cars fly past on an interstate.

The rails scream in the darkness
Sparking, lambent bulbs trace starlight behind tinted glass
No words, just motionless exhibition of man
Child
The shrill yapping of a terrified pup
Ears plugged from the disastrous din of metal rubbing against itself

The train flies through an evacuated tube pressed beneath the innumerable water column
And it is deafening.

Behind us the gentle shipyards, ahead the recipient city
Waiting to drink up our wallets and time with her promiscuous streets
As she bends her towering legs to the ironically Chinese
Barge
Blowing its baritone warning flutes
As it tugs itself upon her Bays.

I am reading the book, seeing the Brothers through the din, in between the two cities
The two unhappinesses
and the creatures they identify with

It is a giant artifact,
the tube
It protrudes through
The ships
She sunk and constructed
Market, Mission, Pier, a swamp of concrete
Over the dried clump of trees
A thousand bits of Theseus
And the abandoned bones of thirsting men
Running east, towards Pittsburg
Richmond
Warm Springs
The line is soft between these rusting zones
And the gold
Forgotten for silicone

I am reading a book
About brothers and the curse of stone
Sharing stares with dirogenous hobos
And girl's pupils
feasting on bodies hidden behind periodicals

The rails scream in protest
The railcars are turning up and out
Towards the end of the darkness
And the start of the largeness

The city waits to list her failures to me
To cry herself to sleep with raindrops of fog
And rasping breaths of breeze.

Me beneath the zenith's sun
The light she gave to Abbadon
Shadows genuflect and none
Could bear the dark's dissatisfaction

But me,
Beneath the zenith's sun
Is life in God's light bastion.

Ahead the span of ocean waves
Towards me and man at end of day
Behold her secrets in our gaze

Yet no sound but hers escapes

Above me, the great zone of sky
Where wonder and darkness forever hide

In her a sad and lonely guise
So blue, so kind,
a lasting cry.

There sit the pebbles on a stream
From ancient depths and time unseen
Stolen deep

From mountain peaks
And laid gently beneath my feet.