1.
In a dream, I'm "word" --
word's the word I'm assigned,
supposed to repeat
when my turn comes around.
We're sitting in a circle in church.
Presumably the others
have other words to say.
In the dream, I'm glad
I get to be "word."
2.
How am I supposed to get a word in edgewise
when the world won't shut up?
Back in waking life,
the apartment of my youth.
Packing up to leave
for middle age.
Invasive beat
bleeds up from the floor below.
Leggy plants tilt at cool windows
just before spring.
Gruff mutts bloom
in the iron aperture
of patient fire escapes,
brick soft like faded jeans.
Bracketing the racket,
sucked teeth,
mulled rage.
How streets circle these stories,
this concussive radiance.
This sweat, this winding sheet.
This Law of the Father.
This not having a plan.
3.
If "miscegenation"
were only in the cards!
However: no such luck as marrying
into anything. Rich
Africa at a gulp
or even two boys
named Winston and Randolph
drinking crab soup
on a long-ago island.
Steering burlap sacks of limes
on donkey-back to market.
Instead: the rain forest.
Moss beards and razor clams.
The Cold War, the troll
under the bridge.
But the girl who played the flute,
that blameless instrument,
has been a woman now
in three or four lives.
With her hair in a drawer, she
begins to improvise.
She writes the ending first.
4.
As I jog on the curb
admiring my new sneakers,
Unhappy Consciousness
pulls up in a van.
Yer ugly he bawls
in the direction of my crewcut,
inexplicably entitled.
5.
In a dream I write a book
called Everything or Nothing.
Over years I drift,
compelled by other rooms.
I give myself
a piece of sound advice:
Don't get too busy
for the street.