‘Killer on the Loose’


1.

My beard is trimmed close to the flesh, so the strong coffee barely touches my mustache. It leaves a scent of dark chocolate and turned soil.

I have never learned to tell the truth, dressed up instead in these words for a passeggiatta in the cool September sun.


2.

A heartless killer is on the loose out there on the streets, all the commentators say so. But you listen on your headphones to the new Dylan album & I

squeeze the fruits of today’s flavor of despair & exasperation. And he may be — since these psychokillers are always a ‘he’ — advancing upon us.

Meanwhile, a landslide along the thoroughfare tumbles tons of rust-orange stone to its berm, and may shrug some more. Another way to die.


3.

I was such a blonde young boy, eyes big as the full, white moon on a November night. Now, my shoulders are scraped red from carting a half-century of time up and down

these sidewalks & I don’t look up nearly as often as I used to, gazing, wonderingly and long, at the starry, starry skies.


~ from “The Air Is Full of the Dreams of Sleeping People” (forthcoming chapbook)

2004/2022 | west virginia

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