Cold gust unbuttons my warmth;
surprisingly, I spot a new restaurant
serving crepes. I am pigeon about
a crepe is. Wonder if it has crumbs
and if they're precise, contaminating
to tidy degrees;

a strange invigoration switches itself
to the sour vehicular horns, that reminds me
of a child who wanted candy off the floor
but was restrained by the threat of imprisonment
as the train cut through Kerala. But the insistence
of the horns is more insistent, their peal
course-correcting to petty nose squinting.
I can hear the metallic lip curl,
the engine revolting at the judgment of the pedestrian
(an opinion of which I'm innocent)
of a vocal car as a wanton idiot, the kind
that still believes that cheetos will come back.

Although to write were a correlation
imputed to healthy inclinations,
rest assured, my disposition
is indisposed to sustain attention,
because I flinch at every mention
of creditable conversation
pretending that you need protection
from my sour justifications-
Holler at auspicious essays
Echoing manifold condescensions.
Let's never get ***** henceforth,
Pass by fetishist pretensions;
Made this out of me but I shall
Evade impulsive desperation.

What sorry semblance be this,
****** out of the upper-right corner eye
smoking a polarized forehead
(boundaries? dope)
balancing on a whim the tenuous gist
of a mocked grin, whose curved lips
is etched on a dusty Ritz's windscreen
out of a second-hand mercy,
like leaves lodging at the outskirts
of hair where they can be plucked from
without protest or curled ends-
this resemblance, an unnatural disclosure
makes you uncomfortably manage yourself
into the shower.

Velvet banal that importunes
with its whiskers on the run,
I see through your ruse-
consoling me with your game
won't work unless you paid the theft of light
adjacent to a lake where the shoal is wrecked
by a knackered, paper-snatching hand, that's wise.

Surface, cold-swept in touch,
unpremeditated serenity in the last fetching dress
that she wears at the superstitious tail of evening
that grates like a ladle scraping rice off a saucepan
and equally grey;
the laid said the made can't take their step until
the rage belts a faint rest, waist-bound and cased out
for questions that range from
whom the clock stayed,
whom the promptbook abandoned,
with whom the slippery sidewalk made contest.

Can't abstract the blood, parked in a cozy spot
as a gift from ambient indifference to proactive smiles-

aware of brackets, their tinge on your face,
your eyes made out of the dark blight on calendars
from bygone years that were never removed,
the fact is we checked out and racked heads
till the press caught our tones to suppress what
in their heads makes a coffee bean
out of an idiom.
Effulgent acid,
like a broken heart that builds
a cottage in the throat,
burns the basis of our nap.

What sad concoctions can we table tonight?
"He said as he typed, back sore from being stacked
against wood"; inexplicable surges pay
for what is one of the last sites, but
holding own in the throat-
a part us, a part I, a cut high,
all in cool, soft as toffee-
sour fun detonates like a gust
from a passing subway car,
jolting hands slap on a turtleneck
as prudent insurance