The Drop Shadow

After the Meredith V. Avakian and Debrah Morkun reading at the Green Line Cafe

Dead to rights being the most common clause here,
around this fallow place, means you must find medium.
How many times have these things been cautiously said:
from boom to bust you must break even, find nature--?

Gallantly the chair creaks beneath us but we,
knowing our own tresses of hair, locks and knots,
go by sitting and gaping and forgetting to ask,
the questions being just above the light's surface.

Through parallax pounds--up from Barthelme I dream
the situation in a different lens, perhaps red
like explosions this time, or perhaps the color
of a hen's feather burning though we can't hide it.

This is who we are, freaks of the mainstream politic
with sores underneath our feat we beg to etch away,
from form to dust, that is how we will settle, but
it is the medium, I demand to be reimbursed--so gentle.

Those porous beads of sweat, that shaky stammering,
frown a little while, open your doors and speak--
anyone can speak this is a democracy go home shut up--
you were wrought with pleasure shut down celebrity--

And up from a tidal wave as if the boat had crested
and the sea was about to remain calm in its aftermath,
sirens wailed visually (yellow lights rebounding
off a sequence of photographs in the urban cafe),

and I tried to decipher all of the runs-around, blends
both haunting and callous, defendable but doomed to sit,
wait and rot, for what is art anyway but a poor disease,
a calling that will reach such perilous ends, an unwant?

To reach that medium, to go insane reaching that medium.
It is a mountain made of glass to chip away the stairs,
a blush of flowers as the sun evaporates the dropped dew,
or a wooden structure in the backyard molding and damp.

And still I return to the miles-away land, can't decide
whether to breath or hang closed, shut my pipes off
like valves in the triumph of the dull-drum Engineer,
a simple idea that will throw us to dark pits, searching.