now the city’s once-poets,
rock-chained and rail-thin,
spout river rust
and rain-washed chalk
plans for overtight epics,
kick
back with
dinnertime gigs
and dimestore glories picking the dead
bits off mediocrity-ridden skin,
become suburban and
enamored
of cheap tequila
Tuesdays that can’t quite erase
the foregone diagnosis
of cancer where
it
hurts the
most. hearthfire
wasn’t sacred
before it existed;
where is your
Prometheus
now?
prometheus
promethea
Caught up in microcosms
and forgetting to breathe
I dance, shivering
over quicksands baked under desert suns,
phenomenon no less strange
than that I am at home in overcast lowlands
dripping dew and melancholy.
Huddled against a prying wind
and shielding what was once flame
from altogether extinction,
I look for direction
to a changeable sky,
try singing,
scribble in mud, hope
only not to become buried
in metaphor.