Eternity loiters outside
the corner store trading
conspiracies for loose cigarettes.

I give her 3, a half empty
Clipper and get ghost as quick
as winter in Qaxaca.
There is air to steal,
bones to pick clean.

This city is a scourge
and I have no plans to change that.
Only the compulsion to
throw my trash on it's burn pile,
pour my salt over it's fields,
and somehow stay numb to the wiles
of the smiling wild down every street
while it all lasts.

That's the only other charity
I'm willing to dredge up.

Don't make that face at me
when the only difference
between us is that you
do the same as I do
just wearing nicer clothes.

We are of the same ilk;
the militant disillusioned
awaiting the next spoonful of anything
that'll turn memory to mist and future to myth.

So ******* back to your routine life
and I'll do the same.
Haven't you heard that mutinies
are useless these days?
The currency of a failed nation.

I wonder what dark plots I could've
feasted on had I not been in so much
of a hurry to leave that corner store?
What forms of wickedness I could've glimpsed slithering; me and dirt covered eternity, just children flipping rocks to watch
centipedes and spiders fleeing from
the heat of God-on-high deeper into
the Earth...

Only the light polluted sky
will ever know the answer to that.