Sheer Curtains
Not yet sunrise, and in an upstairs window
behind a curtain across the street
a silhouette puts up her hair, leans forward
ten degrees to set her breasts in place
before an early shift.
Drunk alone and up all night again
with mute and stupid hopes, but even I
know better than to speak,
not well enough to look away.
I lean against the sill and let the focus fade.
Her light goes out; when dawn begins,
my head is hot against the glass.
Melancholy
As often as required, no more, you bathe
and dress and walk upright like people
knee-deep in mud.
Your home’s a shrine to bad decisions:
Mail-piles tombstone over deadlines past,
Whole years of chores put off
spawned tumbleweeds behind the couch
and you across it, greasy supplicant of melancholy,
ignoring calls and hiding from the landlord,
wasting days in helpless sleep.
Signal Problems
“Everyone’s going to work well not me I’m not going to work.”
– James Moore
Excuse me sir are those—
Sir, I’m going to have to ask—
Sir, don’t block the subway door
with your bundled lifetime of regrets.
The nameless ghosts of there but for the grace
of sheer bad luck and poor decisions
of guilt and guilt and idiot shame—
They fester like corroded wiring
hunger like the living
for something they can’t name.
The lights flicker and the train stops
and we all put down the Economist,
stare and meet no eye and—
And now what? Nobody’s going
to work now.
Office Life
The lobby’s lined with thick bromeliads
deep green and hothouse-reared
rubbed twice weekly with Shultz’s Leaf-Shine
by a man who spends breaks napping
on a chair in the service elevator.
They wilt beneath the polish and the sterile breeze
and are quietly replaced.
Secretly Ironic 