If ever I could be a speeding train on rims electrical I’d be a wreck,
Poles flicker by easily as the late afternoon creeps in beneath the blinds
where I retreat in the after in the ictal in the inbetween - the thin place.
It’s twenty degrees and all I can see, think, is last summer.
Love, how we filled the moments with our nonsense non-love love.
Listened for whom the bell tolled high over Fifth Avenue –
who knew it would be for me?
You plucked the tensile thin string and the clapper licked the bronze side
with that alto bong…
We who would be later, soon, kissing at a tin table as we sat
before a black-flicking minstrel board of the odd integer and place.
I am here. You are there.
My glasses are big and dark; I could be anyone.
I could even be The One.
A note left in a bag goes almost unnoticed –
is lost, then found.
Reads: ‘I love you’ and the day is saved.
Still you wave goodbye, walk away backwards
my backwards lover, always upside down.
Who gives a damn about the train approaching
except the guy on the track who doesn’t see it coming:
God, that’s so me.
I gotta find a way, getta way, put the pedal to the metal,
engine fast and sure, I’ll take it any day
over your shrink-wrapped reality.