pith…

Here in the town of the common
and the good, only the flashes
reach us. There’s no thunder
rumble, no sound to savor,
no low music to score
the out-of-favor soul. No, first
it’s the din, carried air away east, then
the bright, the flight of sand as light,
breaking in waves on main street curbs
where memories are two blocks long.

Homines urbis mundi,
park in the lines diagonally.
Turn right or left one-way
at the pagoda that would be green.

A yo-yo in the hand of the boy on the bike
who ups and downs for most the day,
metal in his head and a knack, at ten,
for squaring every stimulus. Not much to do
for the dudes at Dave’s Music. They swap names
of shared lays, grow their hair pretty long
and each one knows where the other one lives.

The name came
from their language.
Not the painted faces.
Not the whooping fans of earth.
Never the poxed or slaughtered remembered.

A caudal of the flocked strain hymns
through their steepled hole of sky:
grace notes for toothless grinding,
lung gurgles for the oligarchy.
We need this town like you need that tattoo,
a black widow you designed yourself
for Bill the Renaissance Needle to etch.
A helluvan artist, says the ‘Nam vet
with the vulture on his knee.

We barter our hearts like borrowed garments
and run to each other as slow-mo lovers
in a misfed reshoot of a colorized film.

This all must please
the keepers of the grids
that plot our soddled odds
and finagled every street.
We watch the parabolas
full up across the sky,
the tired arc as rising star,
as arbitrary schism between ground
and map to zero. We’re as gods,
we are. Less their entertainments.

Le dessin t’y manifeste.
C’est un mauvais geste.
Oh Lord, it do so work
in sleep and less mysterious ways.

- joesmith

from the way the world comes in, collected pieces from 1990 to 2010. You may buy it from the writer or from Lulu.com.