Lunchbreaks of Vallejo

Another open hock in Lima Louisville, Infant Fall

   from a tree of one hour

And my eyes, kaleidognostic, scan the trash leaps.

Doubled in shop windows, mentally black

In the eye of business types, and there we are: noon’s usual

        halflings. How was I born to

Avoid one or the other? Yet to sense it

    in their bodily drift:

               because I look at them

Like so much information, I have more than

My share. You, Alzheimer One-Arm,

   or you, Rehab Wraiths, problemsmoking in a

Heap by the wig shop—my balance, casual,

          socializes the passing

Edge you stand on. Human beings as

Motifs, recurring offices, it begs us from bed.

But I would never make to remake it again.

These things best contemplated when warm,

Even they, even they once had an uncle.

But that, my friends, is not what I meant.

Those are not directions I would ever take.

                But these ones.

On the brick promenade where work aphids

    like myself skeletonize

Their sandwiches, you, skinny man, I

    walked past you shaking your dreadlocks

    over a trash can. Your organism, so

    roachy and flogged,

And mine, more comely,

It bore food

To do careful thinking between us. My clothes,

You noticed, wore a fear of money. Yours said

                   your mother

                                              was cleanly

Your mother. The vanishing siamese scissors 

Where one person begins snips another.

   A spider-mouth to chew skin-laundry.

I was walking, though, and you saw it.

The action of walking, happy.

It lead me past the TARC stop at 4^th and Muhammad

Where a man-wad spoke, with precise rationality, to his belly.

Continued at a pace, one that

    ate itself

And did not submit

To be eaten. You, though, unmanned you, hybrid, fasting

On the luck of the rest, stunted like chores in the shallows,

What you see is what I saw, all in a claim of sleep.

There is that difference between us.

And that, my friends,

                                is called

The Untrained Skin of Factual Feeling.

Some dim and some healthy.

Some busy, locked to benches.

And some left, l ike true residents, in stomach t-shirts, to digest

The unencumbered waiting of their own.