Thick-lidded Argus
peers across the rain passage:
dozens of glazed, framed eyes
congeal until split with a smoky flick,
tumbling their beige gazes
down onto the spitted walk.

Behind one eye, a woman
cooks her midnight meal:
instant soup in bleachboard
emerges from the microwave throat.

Behind another, a light screams
from a fluorescent hip, ramming itself
into the bruised wall color
before dying in a waving pool
of yellow-milk curtains.

I open the maple door and hunt
for the sweet wax-wet relief,
the glass-arch scythe: Scotch.

Grass castles spring
from the cindered lawn,
the Argus-faced building fades
into rectangles of dulled evening,
& cross-hatched breezes launch themselves
at a ****-haired moon fracture.

Happiness is a quay across the sea.
In this uncaring world, she is a gold reef
in the earth's slow stone:
my failed escape, an inaccessible chance,
a remedy for the thin blood
in the blue universe of the middle-aged vein.

Beer, wine, scotch,
it all goes to the same place -
I have lost patience
with this unsolved heart.
The trees tremble with shadow-spoons
under the Argus building's corpse-pale
fearful installations. Terrible shrieks for help
balloon obscenely into laughter, before
they are gobbled roughly into silence.