~

walk with me in the
under-grounded passage ways,
the city veins,
that bring the arterial, variegated subway lines
to a consensual transfer adjoining,
permitting the rhythmic, exchanging flow of
***** for cleansed humans

observe the compost of
plasma and a city's red, bloodied cells,
bleached white by the cells called overnight

I travel in these tunnels, north-south, others, east-west,
like most, to and fro, homeward bound,
just another salmon of human capital,
cursed to swim upstream, always

signs adorn, positing hope,
giving out points, helpful directives -
"this way to"

example: this way to the nucleus, haughtily christened
by deaf and dead mortals as the
Grand Central Station

in one such tunnel, cut from the earth with dynamite and blood,
a busily traversed one,
so busy that no one looks but me,
is carved in grey Vermont granite,
high above the
gum and spit stained, concrete sodden, trodden walkway,
by order of some bureaucratic joker
taunting sandblasted "art"
cut into the taxpayer-paid-for-stone,
some of Ovid's long ago words

"dripping water hollows out stone,
but not through force but persistence"

am I the only to ken,,
this is a subtle mocking,
of the rushing, hasty, daily-making-their-way commuters,
whose sentences persist,
but are never commuted, never paroled,
who pass by as if entering under Auschwitz's gates,
where work made no one free

each of us a hypotenuse sliding,
gliding from to hook up from angle to angle,
work to home, home to work,
drip, drip of life to no life,
needy for an overnight charge,
to enable a once more unto the morning breach

for long time  now, my glide path remarkable,
my hypotenuse swinging wildly, ignoring its proposed flight plan,
that presumably shows a proposed radar course of semi-certainty

know it to be a bright screen flashing light
of yellowed missed forecasts,
on a dark green background

my poetic words longtime set aside,
in the lost and unfounded, though they continue to
Ovid drip and drip, agonizingly, persistently
hollowing this man

this ever deepening, eroded void
more keenly felt now by the irritating granulated pecking,
of residual specks of detritus,
minimalist poetic notions, a phrase, a gleaning, a touch,
caught in the grate of my eyes,
yet that make not a whole poem,
or human

but Ovid mocks me true,
my dripping sentence persists,
but, the hollow is not hallowed

my secondhand superficial skin, worn as worn,
a sensual recording of all mine history,
an oral history that speaks from within

can you read my lengthy, literary tears?

a sham, this art,
this tunnel of no ending,
to/from/form of deception,
recording the millions roaring waterfall drops of
drip, drip, dripping, slapping footfalls  

great shovels dug this tunnel, but
the days of our lives erode it ever deeper,
wearing it into a burial ground,
where the ocean of forever,
persists as we pass by
an artisanal lie

~

postscript

*oh Steve, my Steve, guilty do I plead,
too loon, too long this recapture of a walk in a life,
emblematic that it speaks not of solstices,
but of chapters in an unfinished novel,
some finished and some unwritten,
but the ending fully scripted and the plot's author
foolishly thinking the beginning can be
reverse engineered

this poem comes from where the words drip into a soul,
one-by-one, as if to create a single one-a-day one time whole,
a vitamin-poem emerges as a
child born, greeting clean the world,
in black and white word amnesiac fluidity,
measured as one measures a mighty waterfall's flow,
weighty beyond pounds and ounces,,
busting the trusted butchers white scales,
busting into wearied and busting open,
here, ends, worn now, worn by time and time again,,
written on shredded, softened-skin scales

I could not give you less,
I could not give you more...