The Sleeper In Transit

The Sleeper In Transit

All I woke with was the gloss of dismantled angels,

exterminated angels on each fingernail.

Nothing is tiring as being an agit prop

at the infinite. Just this morning I woke to

to screams innocent of death and the contractor

wept (eyes like skinned haloes),

saying “He died the way he lived”,

helping them zip the landlord’s bodybag,

his monocles leaking with egg yolk, small

metal pieces I assumed to be tiny clock

hands or bugs gone deviant sticking out.

Babydoll came later, but we were both tired,

and we saw each for the first time, really….

we woke again and were in the a flea market

the city goers like to call “Revisited”

because the burn marks from the first owner’s

operatic death (lighting a cigarette while smoking

and drawing down De Chirico’s moon) were there.

She said I needed a little style and she waxed my

eyelashes into scissored puzzles that got a few stares.

At the bus stop where she left me with the last beer

I saw an abalone moon man screaming at the cops,

saying these papers were his “DOCUMENTS! THEY ARE

MY FUCKIN’ DOCUMENTS!”, and trying to point them

in my direction.

I went to 3:00 mass and I threw open all the confessionals;

moth eaten velvet ropes concealed beatified rodents.

and my heart moved in theirs, theirs in mine.

Everytime I go into the library with no light I genuflect

and put on my yellow raincoat, as in that strange man with Curious

George. I have hung my stopwatches to my knitted eyebrows

and swam the dirty river downtown, hoping to find a helping hand,

hoping to find my pills, hoping to disperse in the black jelly

of an august moon on the bazaar…